It’s Canada Day here in Canada! Is that redundant?

Anyway as long-time readers of my blog have come to understand, I need to be supervised on the weekends — especially on long weekends. Self-injury is one of my problems.

This weekend was no exception.

Instead of me taking it easy and enjoying all of the sights on our place:

I decided to dust off our bicycles and adjust the brakes. After I was finished adjusting my brakes, I took the bike out for a test ride. Everything checked out well going uphill. I turned around and started on my way home — downhill.

The skid mark is the only evidence of my accident.

Cruising downhill, wind blowing by me, the bike felt good. Back brake felt good, front brake felt pretty responsive to light pressure.

It was as I was testing the front brake that someone who doesn’t know any better ran in front of the bike. My reaction was to squeeze the already-squeezed front brake harder. The reaction of my newly adjusted bike was to stop the front wheel without question or hesitation.

I know that my lines weren’t great, but I think I might have pointed my toes as I did a somersault over the handlebars. Mediocre dance form that was.

I’m now the owner of a modest case of road rash. I don’t have Bandaids long or wide enough to cover the scrapes, so DentalInsider suggested that I use Maxipads to cover them. Good suggestion, but I’m not sure how to get them to stick on. This will be maybe yet another use of duct tape.

Moral of story? If you’re masochistically inclined, know that softened water on open wounds is the same as salt water on open wounds.

That’s what Calculus asked me today.

We’re short-staffed for the week but we have been preparing for the week for a while now, so it’s completely planned out. AssistantGirl is working the front desk during the mornings while Calculus helps in the back. After lunch it’s just AssistantGirl and me.

We have scheduled long appointments with lots of space in between so it’s actually quite a nice slow pace of work for me. Reminds me of the early days of the practice. Except without the stresses of trying to get things up and running.

We’d just finished up with our last patient before lunch when Calculus asked, “Hey, who’s that cutie?”

I followed her gaze out the window:

Being a good dentist, I notice details like the exposed thong.

Anyway, this is one of the favorite times of the month for most of the guys in the building where I work. It’s gardening day!

But I have to take Mr. Meatloaf‘s lead here:

Dear Jean-Marc (and Simon, and everyone at Genus Loci),

The Girl and I found our home quite unexpectedly. An unfortunate circumstance provided us the opportunity to visit real-estate properties. From the time we set our feet upon the earth around our place we felt a call — an invitation to explore further. We felt it at that time, but didn’t understand. It was just a piece of land with a house on it. How could there be anything spiritual or soulful drawing us in?

We decided to acquire the property and although the convolutions of life ebbs and flows one’s spirits, we have always felt anchored and at peace here. We felt something else though. It is impossible to express with one or two words what the energy was that we felt around us. There was a sense of harmony between us and the environment, but on the other hand there was a feel of burgeoning unsettlement. We felt a need from around us for something — but what?

I felt that construction of our home in this conservation area destroyed significant habitat and had left a very unstable landscape. Many mature trees were in slow decline, we noticed fewer fauna around the property, and neighbours were constructing on their properties with even less regard for these issues.

Somewhat by coincidence we found your company. We liked your ideas of landscaping with minimal ecologic impact. Your expertise in this area gave us confidence in your ideas. We hired you to design and build a landscape around our house that would restore some of what was destroyed. It was the least we could do, we thought, and yet the work would likely not restore the ecology to the nature of what had been here.

This project turned into a massive undertaking fraught with obstacles of every type. But I have found this to be true of anything worthwhile in life. The value of a thing is only understood by the difficulty to achieve it.

And now it is done.

The professionalism of you and your crew helped to carry us through one event after another and in more ways than one you facilitated a successful completion of the project. You carried our stresses on your shoulders so that we wouldn’t have to.

Although the project demanded more of you and your resources than any of us expected, I know that your creations here will forever contain some of your spirit. The Girl and I will do everything within our power as long as we live here to keep that spirit resonating.

From the natural pool that you created, frogs sing. From the Birches in the back that replace those wise ones lost, I hear the wind sigh happily. From the Sumacs and Dogwoods in the front, and the ferns in between, sits a single turtle looking out to the road. He is at peace. So are we all. We are home again and it is far beyond any home our dreams could have conjured.

Thank you for recapturing the spirit of our place.

It’s that time of the year when storms in Workland can knock power out for seconds to hours. It’s an annual ritual for us to have at least 1 patient per year experience a power failure during a procedure.

I only work during the day and we have lots of windows in the treatment rooms at the office but storm clouds are quite dark and so we usually have to break out the flashlights in order to finish things up. I haven’t needed a power generator…yet. That’s unlike the periodontists next door.

A patient that I saw back in 2005 during a power failure returned yesterday for me to check out an unrelated tooth. Here’s my treatment note from back then:

Here’s my post-op xray of the tooth I worked on (I did the 5 and the 7):

And here’s the tooth as it stands today:

There’s a massive screw post that her dentist has placed almost to the apex. I don’t know how long this tooth will survive before it either splits along the root or bacterial leakage happens alongside the post.

Morale of story? Not really sure, but it has something to do with power failures affecting root canal treatment prognosis less than irresponsible dentistry does.

I was doing very well at lowering that stack of journals behind my desk until Twitter came along. Sure, Entrecard slowed me down a bit, but I knew the novelty of card dropping would wear thin soon enough.

Twitter’s programming overhaul that it has been undergoing over the last week has given me some time to consider reading some of those journals but I’ve gotten bogged down with unusually wacky patients and dentists. So the journals will have to wait.

Why not take some home you ask?

If I took them home to read, I wouldn’t be able to follow Calculus around and visually record her crazy antics. For example here she is intent to swim in our new pool. The water is still a little frigid, but that’s nothing that a wet suit won’t fix:

And after shivering around in the pool, you get tired. So why not find a nice warm rock to take a nap on?