Collar ties

Our house is a post and beam house and so for the past 16 years, I have enjoyed looking at the wooden structure that holds our little house together.

A collar tie is essential to keep the roof from buckling — it serves a similar purpose to a flying buttress except from the inside. Without collar ties, if there is too much load, the sides will buckle out and the structure will collapse.

That is sort of what has happened to two of my molars. The fillings are so deep that with 35-40 years of chomping down on the filling and edge of the tooth, the enamel finally has given way. And so today I had the first go-round for the second crown on my last molar. These teeth need collar ties and I don't know how one creates a dental collar tie.

Unfortunately, I am one of those people that doesn't respond to a lot of novocain. Even after being quite shot up, I still felt the drill every time it got near the centre of the molar. Since i had the funeral on the heels of the appointment, I told the dentist just to keep on drilling (drill, baby, drill) because I didn't have time to wait for yet more novocain to work. Of course in the last 15 minutes of a 2 hour-appointment, finally things numbed up. Ah, c'est la vie.

I'd rather sit in the dentist's chair than go through what I went through last night... especially because I KNEW everything would be fine today as it was.

However, the dentist and funeral have wiped me out so this is all I can produce tonight.