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blacklight crown revealer
Tuesday, October 18 2022
In the remote workplace today, I managed to catch up on some procrastinated (because it's both fraudulent and demeaning) time logging, which always feels good to get behind me. I also figured out a few more things about the EPPlus Excel library, mostly that uploaded spreadsheets cannot be altered except to add new worksheets that can be altered (which seems to be confirmed by an unanswered question on StackOverflow).
I've had blacklight (that is, near-visual ultraviolet) flashlights at both the Hurley house and the Adirondack cabin since shortly after Joe the Lead Developer and I gifted Allee (the project owner) with a blacklight flashlight to confirm whether or not her antique glass was actually uranium glass. I too had some uranium glass that I wanted to see glow, so I'd ordered my own blacklight flashlights (they came in a pair) and I indeed made that uranium glass chicken glow a little over a week ago. Today, on a whim, I shined the blacklight on my new crown. Doing this, it was immediately obvious that it was made of a different material than a natural tooth. It reflected (technically, fluoresced with) much less white light than my God-given teeth. I then showed Gretchen, and she was amazed. So then I shined the blacklight in her mouth, where two of her lower teeth (the canines perhaps) also seemed dim compared to her other teeth. These were two of the teeth that required root canals and crowns after her car was side-swiped by a freight truck on a freeway in Milwaukee about 25 years ago. (Supposedly this had caused her to clench her teeth so violently that this caused several of them to later develop abscesses.)
This afternoon, Gretchen spent a fair amount of time down in the cool, still unheated kitchen making and baking a lasagna in preparation for an indoor dinner party on Wednesday, our first in longer than I can remember.
Later while she was off teaching her class of prisoner mediocrities, I indulged myself with a second bath in only two days. Back when I was a kid and my father rationed water because we collected it from the roof, a bath was a rare indulgence allowed only when it was raining. But now I'm a grown-ass adult. It still feels like an indulgence, but I can take one any time I want. Still, I feel like if I take too many, Gretchen (as the impersonation of my conscience) might say that I'm being wasteful, though she probably wouldn't.
While I was in the bathtub, my brother Don called from Virginia and immediately told me he'd received that book (I Contain Multitudes) that I'd ordered him during our last phone call. He then complained that he was now unable to watch "movies" on his flip phones, one of his few pleasures in life. I suggested he try from closer to a cellphone tower, since it sounded like he might be having connectivity issues. But if the problem persisted, he should go to the Cricket Cellular office in Waynesboro (or Staunton, if there is one) and complain. I thought Don might be interested in learning that a recent 23AndMe database update had discovered I (and thus Don too) is 0.2% Gujarati (that is, southwest Indian). That places our Gujarati ancestor as having been born around the year 1800. As I was then telling Don about our 0.5% Coptic Egyptian ancestry, which I assumed he would find interesting (since it was about him), he revealed he wasn't interested with his classic segue: "I don't mean to change the subject, but..." He then wanted to talk about menopause and the production of estrogen by the human brain for some reason. Only very late in the call did Don bring up that our mother Hoagie had experienced a series mental episode recently. Don had been asleep in the trailer when Joy Tarder came over and found Hoagie in a state where she didn't even know who she (Hoagie herself) was. She was immediately hospitalized and given various fluids, and she recovered quickly. After telling Don that he had to make sure Hoagie was eating, I said that, in future, he should lead his calls with such important news and leave other topics (such as what he'd read in a book recently) for later in the conversation.
After Gretchen came home, we watched Jeopardy! and the first episode of the documentary Bad Vegan. I expected Sarma Melngailis, the subject of Bad Vegan, to be one of those vapid vegan-for-health-reasons celebrity vegans, but she is depicted to be someone more in the mold of a Gretchen-style vegan, someone with deep empathy for the downtrodden and the marginalized. In the first episode, she is shown freely giving money to all the panhandlers she encounters and adopting a rescue pit bull. I'm sure kooky things will start happening in later episodes, but for now she seems like the kind of vegan Gretchen and I would have as a friend.
My tooth under natural light (left) and under "blacklight" (right).
The tooth actually looks darker in real life than it came out in this photo,
since digital cameras have a different sensitivity than the human eye.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?221018 feedback
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