I got the wisdom teeth out yesterday morning. I’m happy to report that my first experience with general anesthesia was not a bad one, everything went smoothly. The only unfortunate hiccup that happened was misreading of my x-rays. Apparently when my dentist sent them over the sticker was on the wrong side, leading the surgeon to believe the bottom tooth that needed to be taken out was on the right side of my mouth. Not so! He went digging on that side of the mouth and didn’t find it and had to go to the left side. So only 3 teeth out, but 4 stitched up wounds. I go back next week to get the stitches removed.

Recovery yesterday wasn’t so bad, I was pretty woozy the whole day but fairly confident I’d be perfectly fine until around 6PM when I guess the local anesthesia started wearing off and it felt like someone kicked me in the face. Ouch. Michael took care of me yesterday, encouraging me to drink a lot of water and in the evening he made me the most delicious chocolate and banana milk shake. The Oxycodone isn’t as useful as I had hoped, I slept badly because of the pain and as they warned me I woke up several times with the sockets pussing and drool on my pillow (which I covered as they suggested since that’s normal). Yuck. So I didn’t much sleep last night, and I’m still in a lot of pain. This morning isn’t terribly fun so far, I’ll be going back to bed or to zone out in front of the TV once the Oxycodone kicks in again.

Pain aside, I’m very happy this is over – no more wisdom-tooth induced toothaches and headaches!

The weekend of the 20th Michael and I headed to West Virgina for our anniversary. It was a pretty mellow weekend, got to take a hike on Sunday, eat lots of amazing food and after finding Raiders of the Lost Ark in the video collection we took advantage of the free satellite broadband connection and snagged the rifftrax for it. The weather was beautiful for the weekend and we took a bunch of pictures, which I’ll get around to sorting and posting soon.

Last week I finally scheduled the date to get my wisdom teeth removed – November 9th. Earlier probably would be better, as I ended up with a pretty terrible headache Friday morning which caused me to hit the Vicodin the surgeon gave me specifically for when the pain prior to surgery got too bad. Yikes, that’s some drug, I took it in the morning and still wasn’t quite right when I went to the gym that afternoon (and come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t have gone to the gym…). Alas, they didn’t have any openings at the surgeon until the 9th, so another few days of waiting for me, at least the pain isn’t too bad every day, but it is enough to be annoying. I went to get a cleaning at the dentist today – teeth are all squeaky clean now!

Saturday I did a presentation on Ubuntu Women for Ubuntu Open Week. It was cool being asked to do a session and I think it went quite well, log here.

Saturday evening I met up with Nita, her sister and her sister’s husband to head down to a Halloween party down in Philadelphia. I had a nice time, but my aggressive shyness showed up and I wasn’t terrible social. Arg, I thought I was doing better! Toward the end of the night I got tired too, and since I had a lot on my mind I got a bit mopey. We left the party around 2AM, so it was after 3 before I arrived home.

Sunday I got some work done (making up time for that headache that ruined my Friday!) and then headed out do run some errands and do some shopping. When I got home I got ready for the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Release / Halloween Party. In spite of the fear of sounding like a total nerd, I ended up having a blast, sitting at the rowdy end of the table with Matthew Rosewarne and Brian Stempin who I know from PLUG (Haha! Now you both have Google juice saying you were rowdy at an Ubuntu release party!). Too bad we were sworn to secrecy about the topic of conversation, some fun stories were shared. Jim’s wife took a bunch of pictures. I’m the one dressed as a witch (and someone-who-shall-not-be-named asked if I was dressed up as one of the founders of the Ubuntu Women project, to which I replied “Yes, and I have come to take all the fun out of Ubuntu!” See, we have a sense of humor!). We ended up staying quite late, they closed the dining room and were nudging us to the bar when we finally wandered out shortly before 11PM.

Tomorrow night we’re headed to the Keswick Theater to see Sinead O’Conner, hopefully will have time to hook up with our friends David and Kathy for dinner who also snagged a pair of tickets for the show.

Now I should head to bed so I get enough sleep!

Michael now has a date for his hip surgery: December 10th

I got a 21″ monitor! They were getting rid of them at Michael’s office. It’s still a CRT, but it’s got less wear and tear on it than my 19″ – no more having to use a monitor that sometimes makes weird noises and has to have the brightness turned all the way up.

I got a jury summons. The timing on this was pretty horrible, the whole tooth thing had me stressed out already, now this? Arrgg…

Michael got an iPhone. His boss has had one for a while and is moving forward with buying them for the staff, Michael got his a bit early after an unfortunate accident with his Razr.

We went out for sushi last night, very good.

I got my share of the Ubuntu Aluminium Case Badges. Very spiffy.

I went to a Philadelphia Area Network Technologies User Group (PANTUG) meeting this week. There wasn’t a presenter so it was all pretty informal, I got a whole history lesson on the group. It’s primarily Windows folks, and I don’t hang out with Windows people that often, so that was interesting. I got to have the classic Windows admin vs Linux admin exchange of “Why would you bother with a command line when there was a GUI that can do it for you?” “Why would you mess around with clicking through a GUI when you could just type a command?” And I got to ask about Vista, which wound them up into a storm of how horrible it was. The second half of the meeting was moved to a local restaurant, where I ended up sitting with the two people I knew (who are linux guys) and had a nice time chatting with them. My visit to this group was primarily for networking purposes, I’m trying to get a feel for the local technology groups so I have an In for spreading news and resources.

I think that’s it. It was a busy week and I’m tired. We don’t have any plans for the weekend so far aside from errands and little things. I have to do some serious housecleaning of my office – it looks nice to the untrained eye, but my computer needs to be opened up and dusted out, and my desk drawers are turning into an unmanageable mess…

Monday evening I had a very bad headache. It was pretty obvious based on the pattern that had been developing with my toothache that this was caused by my lovely wisdom teeth. That evening I called another dentist in the area for an earlier appointment and canceled my October 18th appointment. I ended up with an appointment with a dentist on Wednesday afternoon to look at my teeth.

The result? The x-ray:

Yep, my wisdom tooth is clobbering a molar and causing trouble. Also, I only have three wisdom teeth, one on the bottom and the two at the top. Apparently this isn’t unusual – some people have none and some have all four. Huh.

So the dentist gave me a referral to an oral surgeon, who I saw yesterday. I learned that all three are impacted and the two top ones absolutely have to come out, one of them hurts and the other had started to come through the gum (so is susceptible to infection). The third is a “full bone impaction” – it hasn’t broken the gum line and is stuck deeper. Of course they want to remove all three while they are in there, to cut down the risk of having to go back and remove them at a later date. I agreed this would be the way to go and they gave me a quote:

1 full bone impactation: $525
2 partial bone impactions: $856
45 minutes anesthesia: $553
Decadron: $72

Total: $2006
Dental insurance: -$1000
My bill: $1006

Teeth are expensive! I’m quite annoyed at the dentist I saw last year who told me that my wisdom teeth were fine, according to the surgeon I saw today there was very little chance they were “fine” last year because of how fully grown in they already are and my testimony that the troublesome one was already poking through the gum at that point. So not only am I now in this position where I need to skip out on work for emergency dental and surgeon visits twice this week and deal with all this pain, I am now covered under insurance that won’t pay more than $1000 in dental services per year! The insurance I had last year was far better. Ugh.

I’ll be scheduling this sometime in the next few weeks. The timing is unfortunate, as Michael and I are going away for our anniversary next weekend and I’d rather not be in pain, but I also don’t want to have wisdom teeth surgery just prior to leaving! So the doctor has me on 600mg of Advil every 8 hours and gave me a prescription for Vicodin should the pain become unmanageable prior to surgery. He also put me on antibiotics to kill an infection that is probably causing most of the pain and advised that I see a dentist for a cleaning ASAP and brush my teeth after every meal, or at the very rinse my mouth out to keep things as clean as possible in there to avoid further infection. Aside from being expensive – teeth are so troublesome!

Ah teeth.

Post w/specs from the fellow who gave it away. Michael snagged it as soon as the post hit the list. It’s a very nice little machine. My first thought was to toss Ubuntu on it, but Michael convinced me to give Solaris 10 a chance. This is probably a wise move, I could do with some real Unix experience.

So this morning we installed Solaris 10, doing all the security updates now. If all this go as planned I’ll be putting an extra harddrive in here soon and setting up this machine to run as the backups machine for my desktop.

I haven’t been in the mood for posting at all lately.

Work has been great, but a lot of stressful things have been happening that have caused my stress level to remain quite high. I don’t like to write when I’m stressed or otherwise too emotional because too often the posts end up either rambling or too negative. All that aside – I feel good this morning so I will catch up a bit!

I have a toothache. I went to the dentist about a year ago for a cleaning and checkup after 6 years of having neither, got a couple cavities filled (my first cavities!) and x-rays taken where the dentist was confident that my wisdom teeth would come in fine. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. On the evening of my birthday the wisdom tooth on the right side (which has come in further than the one on the left) started to hurt. I hoped it would go away, but it’s been growing increasingly annoying throughout the week and I finally got a callback from a local dentist to make an appointment. The woman I spoke with was so sure this pain meant I need them removed and scheduled me with the oral surgeon to take a look at it on October 18th and then plan to get it removed. Oh what fun.

Our 1st wedding anniversary is coming up in a couple weeks. We’ve had ideas floating around for a few months as to what we should do for it, but never solidified anything and before I knew it October had crept up! We ended up reserving a comfy 3-day weekend in West Virginia at the North Fork Mountain Inn. We’ve been to this Inn before, and although the place was amazing, we were not at all impressed with the woman who was running it (even got an apology letter from the owner following our stay, I won’t get into it…). It’s under new ownership now and I’m happy to say that I’m very excited to be going back. After the reservations were booked online I got an email from one of the owners, and within a couple days a letter confirming our reservation and a nice little pamphlet talking about the Inn. Very professional! They’ll be providing dinner on Saturday and Sunday and didn’t have a problem accommodating our fish+vegetarian dietary restriction. Hooray for a weekend of snuggling in blankets, movies, a jacuzzi tub and beautiful West Virginia mountain views!

Projects… In spite of spending more time on my computer lately, I honestly have to say that I haven’t made any noteworthy steps forward in any projects I’m working on. The Ubuntu LoCo stuff is progressing nicely, my Ubuntu-Women focus is now highly dependent on the relaunch of the Classroom project, organization of which is chugging along. LUG stuff is going well. I got a text-based install of Debian under QEMU running the other evening, but this can hardly be called an accomplishment, since it went like this:

elizabeth@hour:~$ apt-get install qemu (installs stuff I need)
elizabeth@hour:~$ qemu-img create debian-qemu 3G (create QEMU “partition”)
elizabeth@hour:~$ qemu -hda debian-qemu -cdrom debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso -m 192 -boot d (launch debian installer with some iso I had)
elizabeth@hour:~$ qemu -hda debian-qemu (start up)

Difficult huh? I’m impressed by QEMU so far in the capacity that it’s going to be infinitely useful for testing. Pretty neat stuff.

Thursday afternoon Michael Toren mentioned in IRC that the movers for his move out to California had just left and his house was now empty. Never passing up an opportunity to see a friend before they move away, I suggested an “empty house party” and 4 hours later we were having a nice dinner at the General Lafayette Inn with him and Nita. It was excellent getting to catch up one last time before he leaves, we weren’t expecting to get that opportunity. As for the food, they overhauled their menu since we last dined there, instead of the delicate upscale dining we’re used to there, their menu is full of pub food. Now granted, this was some spectacular pub food and I wasn’t about to complain, but certainly a change. Overall it was a great night, and it was after 10PM by the time we ended up leaving the restaurant.

I’m on call this weekend, so the only plans I have are skipping out for a couple hours Sunday afternoon for a Shiatsu massage by a great fellow we met through the Shamanism class we took a couple years ago. This will be our second session with him, our first was several months ago and he has since had even further training in the method. Should be very nice.

I’m now 26.

We’re headed out to the Victory FallFest to celebrate and Michael bought me a big ole carrot cake from Whole Foods – yum!