It’s been a good one, so let’s check a few things in.
Okay, health and fitness update first. So my mouth hurts pretty bad. That’s a line that would open up some good good riffs in my friend group… might have to remember that one for the next hang and throw out an easy one for the boys. But honestly, I’d rather it just clears up and I forget. I should explain why it hurts before you come up with wild ideas of your own – I had some dental work done. There are a few items in my dental record on watch, and when I recently went in for a routine cleaning, we added a new one. Somehow, I still have all of my wisdom teeth, and one of them has fared a little worse than the other three. I think it might be the one that took a drumming from a rifle-butt in my 20s, though I don’t think that would have affected this situation either way. Anyway, that one got a filling some years back and that filling popped out recently between dental visits. My dentist, my usual dental hygienist, and everyone else in that office rules, so they immediately got me booked to fix that just a few weeks later.
Time for a quick side thought – with my ongoing schoolwork, I have a strong urge to tighten up that last paragraph. It’s late and I want to just bang this out before I retire for the day, so I’m going to resist that urge. But just so you know, I see it too.
Okay, so the dentist got up in the cavity left by the missing filling and found some rot. He cleaned it up, filled it in, and polished up some of my existing metal fillings while he was in there. Pretty sweet bonus, that last bit, which will hopefully add some life to those old fillings. But this wizzy needed more work than expected, which resulted in some pretty serious ouchiness. The healing and swelling have not been super fun. Well, not that I expected them to be fun or anything, but I guess I wasn’t really expecting anything when I walked in. Before I left, he warned me there would be not only some soreness but also possibly some pain, and he was not wrong. As a surprise, being not constantly drunk and/or hungover has made pain medicine extraordinarily more effective. I cannot believe how quickly and how thoroughly just a pair of over the counter pills can evaporate the unreal pains I’ve been having in my stupid face, but there it is.
In the fitness portion, it seems that my unlikely weight loss may have been real. I had clocked in at 240 a few weeks ago, which was the huge drop, and I had a feeling it was a fluke. I guess I’ve become accustomed to just failing to meet health goals for so long that it’s hard to believe when I make progress, even when I reconfirm multiple times with different sources. On top of that, I also had to figure that I’d lose a lot of progress on the give-or-take week that I had to take off from regular exercise. In case you missed it from last week, I had some serious foot blisters that I needed to stay off of, results of some bad gear and a little smidge of overdoing it. But I clocked in my weight today, later in the day and not with all the measures that help for a lighter weigh-in, and still came up with 243. I even had icecream sandwiches, plural, over the last few weeks. So I guess I must be doing something right.
I do want to also mention that I haven’t forgotten about the things I keep saying I want to talk about, but I am going to note that the timing on when I get around to any of them is now unclear. Though I have started writing on a few of those topics, which puts me further on the path to completing than previous projects. Really, they just aren’t the priority right now. There is room for them to be in the higher priority, because they are writing, and all writing relates to my top goals. However, I need to make some more tangible progress on those top goals before I’ll feel comfortable dedicating that time to what are, let’s be honest, side projects. This whole blog is a side project. At this pace, it feels worth doing. But much slower and things get in question and much faster puts the same questions in a different though equally unflattering light. Still, I do want talk about these things. I especially want to hurry up and talk about this board game I’ve been playing with a couple of friends. Others on the list that come mind include some music practice sessions, some media I’ve been enjoying, my utter lack of romance, and also some new clothes that I’m both a little embarrassed about but also think I rather like. We’ll see how I feel about any of those when I actually get around to finishing the thoughts, but there they are. I don’t know when, and don’t hold your breath, but I do plan to eventually get around to each of those thoughts. Oh, and I’ve been sketching some more, but that’s an easy update – I’m still bad. I mean, better, I suppose, but still very scratchy and not where I’d like it to be.
On another note, I’ve been wanting to take a bit of a train journey for a good while now and never got around to it. I’ve had a lot of things I’ve been wanting to do that I’ve not gotten around to, and there have been plenty of reasons. I think that might be a future subject, separate from this. This specific one has mostly just been dreaming without commitment or follow-up. Right now, it’s still pretty easy to put off and ignore, but as I’ve found myself getting stuck in the idea phase of things, I figure I need to start getting some in order. Ideas, that is. Some of the key ideas I need to start nailing down are when and where to. There are more items that need considering, of course, it is travel. And I haven’t traveled in a good while, so I will need to re-familiarize myself with some of my preferred practices as I approach it. But with a “when” undecided, that basically just means “never”. And I don’t want this to be a never.
So I’m going to use this space to log a few of those thoughts right now. The first is on the when, which I’m still going to leave pretty wishy-washy, as seems appropriate given my current state of being. For a little more solid ground, I’ve decided to tie it to my academic progress, though I’m not exactly sure how. Were I already lined up for a traditional college experience, I would schedule this for the end of a semester or sometime during one of the longer breaks. I’d prefer winter, because I love the cold and the snow, but we’re coming up on that mighty quick, and I know for sure I’m not doing that this year or early next. The other option, which might make more sense if I go with the less traditional self-paced college, is to tie it to credits. Plan the trip for when I hit the halfway mark. Seems reasonable. So by the end of this year, I’m going to decide on what to tie it to exactly, be it season or benchmark. An autumnal trip would be lovely, though.
Location wise, I just found out that Amtrak goes right into Glacier Nation Park. From Baltimore, there are no direct routes, but that’s fine as well. I could either be happy with the most direct route and make sure I have sleeper cars booked for the longer stretches, or make more of a laid-back journey of it, which is currently my favorite idea. I’d have to be careful about my budget and also make sure I’m not missing any serious health considerations, but I like the idea of a stop in Chicago, which is a place I like and haven’t been in a very long time. The destination of Glacier would be really quite great for me. I love that park, and I love Montana in general. I think gettin’ in some Big Sky would do me a spot of healing, too. It’s not the only option, and I can see myself changing those plans for a variety of reasons, practical and otherwise, but it’s at least a good place to start.
And a start it is, albeit a bit loosy-goosy of one for the time being. With that, I can begin looking at the viability of this plan, considering other options, budgeting and comparing, and so forth. You know, the fretting about shit part. I’m pretty good at that part.
And that’s it for today. Wow, just over an hour. Not much editing, which ain’t great, but we’re going to call that a win anyway.