Into the Teeth of the Storm
I am sitting on my Delta flight on the tarmac at San Diego International waiting to take off for JFK and then, after a few hours, boarding a similar flight to Barcelona. No, there is no storm here in San Diego, but more importantly, the weather.com radar map, as forecasted through the afternoon when we depart JFK later, does not look like there is any storm warnings since whatever weather has been inflicting the Northeast looks to be heading offshore while we are in the air to JFK. Ain’t technology and meteorological forecasting a wonderful thing? While there is still no certainty in weather prognostication, we can get a damn sight closer to knowing what the immediate future of the weather looks to be like. Weather is the ultimate Big Data application simply because there are so many damn variables that even IBM cannot grapple with all the data associated with those variables. By the way, my declaration about the weather and data seems to be borne out by the daily reminder I am greeted by when I look at weather.com each morning. It is proudly labeled now as “An IBM Business”. You don’t see such bold corporate connections so clearly stated very often these days. Most often, the legal department tries hard to distance the corporate corpus from liability by keeping ownership and hierarchy very hush-hush. Not so IBM when it comes to weather.com. I guess when you are the IBM elephant and you have worn out your dance shoes (thank you Lou Gerstner), you validate yourself whenever and wherever you can and we all find the logic is thinking that we like IBM handling our daily weather needs. Now, if they could only control it rather than just report it and forecast it…
By the way, the autumnal Atlantic Hurricane season seems to be off to a roaring start with Puerto Rico already reeling from Fiona, which is heading north through Bermuda, but not northerly enough to interfere with our flight path to Barcelona (I hope). At the same time, there seems to be a double-header coming into the Gulf of Mexico with a tropical storm spreading its spaghetti line possibilities northward to the gulf coast with some degree of caution while tropical storm Newton is playing around with Mexico’s west coast. We already had one Pacific hurricane make the unusual move of traveling north of Tijuana and spanking San Diego a few weeks ago. It was quite a local event, bringing much needed rain to an otherwise dry summer’s end. We like hurricanes if they can drop their rain and then get the hell out of there. It only cost me one spa umbrella and a few displaced items of yard art that were easily reset. I will add that my eight-foot metal Mexican rooster, which I have thoroughly anchored with 18-inch rebar J stakes did not budge during all the commotion. Likewise, my large caliente-red shadesail over the parking area (aptly called Tortilla Flats by me) did a bit of flapping, but otherwise held its ground quite nicely. Those eight-inch diameter solid steel poles cemented into the bedrock my house sits upon were money well-spent to keep that massive wind-catcher in its place. Its good to go to industrial strength on such things when you want them to stay put during a hurricane or a nasty Santa Ana windstorm.
So, as I contemplated our departure (you might think we were leaving for a year-long sojourn, but its only actually 19 days that we will be gone), I felt that everything was adequately battened down. I was so calm that I sat watching TV the other night using one of those plastic toothpicks to get my flossing-equivalent time in. That’s when the toothpick caught on something and a piece of tooth was suddenly rolling around in my mouth, much to my dismay. You see, I really haven’t had any issue with my teeth in years. I have been able to avoid all those nasty events like root canal procedures or having my gums cut back due to pyorrhea or some other scary condition. I looked into my mouth in the mirror and sure enough, a lower back right molar had lost a corner of itself and there appeared to be some darker, probably decay-related coloration where the enamel had been. I called and got an emergency 7:45am appointment to secure the site so that I would not find myself on some Pyrenees mountaintop holding my jaw in pain.
I use my sister Kathy’s dentist and she seems very competent and pleasant. What still amazes me is the way they now can photograph your teeth so up-close and personal. I was able to sit in the dentist chair and join my dentist and her hygienist in looking at a close-up of the broken tooth as well as an x-ray that showed (fortunately) that the decay did not go down as far as the root (lucky me, still no need for a root canal job). That insidious decay probably got in under the corner of that old silver filling (probably dating back to my days as a child in Costa Rica since I was told that that molar likely came in when I was about six years old) and then weakened the enamel until I pulled it off with the toothpick. Upon close inspection of the pictures of the tooth (something I had never seen with such clarity), I could see that it reminded me of my back deck when I was deciding how to repair it last year. This thing had been patched over the years, but was now ready to be ground down and capped, something I have never had done before, but seems somewhat inevitable as aging takes its course.
I was told they would do that when I returned from Spain and that until then they would put in a bonded repair piece after cleaning out the decay. That all happened quickly and painlessly with an ultraviolet glue gun being the main instrument of repair (I wonder if that’s the same sort of glue gun I recently bought on Amazon?). As I was leaving, the hygienist warned me that I had better realize that this fix was only a temporary and while there would be the temptation to think it would last me and that I wouldn’t really need to come back for a crown, that was not the case. She put an exclamation point on it by handing me a little packet of dental wax which she said I was to use to plug the hole in the tooth should I do something silly like eat a caramel or use a toothpick too roughly again and find myself eating the molar repair piece with my tapas by mistake. I thought this was a very effective message. She was telling me that yes, they had fixed my problem, but I had better realize that without them and their handy-dandy fixer-upper tools (like some simple but all-important dental wax), I would invariably find myself in a world of hurt.
I really like this dental operation and I respect the message they were giving me. They took me in quickly, fixed the problem painlessly, set me up for a return visit for the permanent solution and even gave me a belt to go with my suspenders should I have a follow-on problem. What more could I ask. I felt ready to venture forth into the teeth of the storm.