Dental Work

About 2 days ago I noticed my gums on one side of my lower jaw were swelling a bit. Typically I find that the waterpik takes care of getting out whatever food has slipped below the gums and everything settles down, but today, Saturday, I woke up with a swollen gland as well. Not good. I went to WebMD to self-diagnose and discovered it was most likely a dental abscess or the mumps. Being that I've been vaccinated against the mumps, I decided to call my dentist on a Saturday. Fortunately for me my dentist is my dad and is only an hour and a half away. Given the tooth that had started it all, he was pretty sure I would need a root canal and since I've never had one of those, I wasn't too excited about the prospects . . . especially on a Saturday. So the girls and I loaded up to go visit nana and grindaddy and they were psyched and I was . . . well, . . . not so psyched. So dad took me apart -- numbing my entire lower jaw (imagine what he did when I was a teenager giving him grief!!! just kidding . . . ) and taking x-rays which showed nothing. Then he decides to look in the filled cavity to see if perhaps something there would be able to be drained. After drilling half of my tooth to remove my very large filling, he discovers nothing new stumping him (and that's hard to do since he's been in practice over 30 years). He consults with another dentist in his building (also working on Saturday) and he too is stumped. So now I'm on antibiotics, hoping to rid my body of this crazy swelling. A part of me is wishing it might be mumps so I don't have to preach tomorrow, but that's a pretty lame request, isn't it? I really don't feel like suffering and all. The good part is that I got to spend some time with my family and we even got a day of homeschooling done at Nana's (they've had some time off since I've been away so we're playing catch up.) Here's hoping I heal quickly. DH insists I look like I have a goiter with this swollen gland (he's so romantic!)

Oh, and while I'm talking about my hometown, let me tell you that they've torn down all of their old schools and built humongous schools -- the elementary school looks like a fine hotel; the middle school looks like a junior college; and the high school looks like a full service college. It's unbelievable. It's also a bit uncomfortable for me. I am sure these are wonderful monuments of learning for the children in that county, but I can't help but think that two counties over, we do not have the money to establish such landmarks. And maybe that's OK. After all, we just converted the old Food Lion supermarket into the kindergarten learning center. We're "recycling" rather than "rebuilding" and there is something to be said for that too. FL is notorious for tearing down and building things that are bigger and better, but sometimes I wonder if bigger and newer IS necessarily better. Just something going on in my Arbuckle Creek-ish mind.

For this is the news from Arbuckle Creek, where the schools are still standing, the golf carts have headlights at night, and the women gossip excessively while watching their children in sports.