It’s self-care week here at Out There — the column. Sometimes I get in a groove around the house and check a bunch of neglected jobs off the to-do list. Gutters get cleaned out, firewood gets stacked, furnace filters get replaced.
Sometimes the car gets all the attention. Oil gets changed, cupholders get de-gunked, trunks get vacuumed. This week was about me.
I’m still a work in progress, but I got a lot accomplished. In just one day, I got help from head to almost toe. It started with a routine dental checkup and my guy says I’m good for another 6,000 smiles.
It was fine, but I don’t know why he taps my teeth with a little hammer then asks if I felt any discomfort. All of it was discomfort. All of it.
The cleaning and poking and inspecting is all fine — just part of the job. The real torture is the chit chat. Do you dentists and hygienists know what you’re doing by asking us questions while we have a mouth full of scrapers, suction hoses and, not to be overlooked, almost all of YOUR fingers? Why is that a good time to ask, “So, how was your summer?” I don’t want to be rude, so I try to answer.
“Hm huh muf lah.” Maybe you don’t really care about the answer. Maybe you understand exactly what I’m saying.
I don’t know. With a clean bill of dental health, I went to try to solve a real physical issue. A while ago, I mentioned that I’d lost the ability to sit criss-cross apple sauce.
They say, “use it or lose it” and over the years I have lost th.