We’re going to try to see Ghostland tonight in Orlando at the House of Blues. They’re playing as part of the “SoCo underCOVER” tour, where bands theoretically play all covers (we’ve read otherwise).
The show is free if you’ve signed up ahead of time. Just showing this special text message I’ve received at the door should get me in. We’ll see how that works.
As long as we don’t end up driving to O-town for nothing, I’ll be happy.
Last week was my first trip to the dentist in who-knows-how-long, probably like 6 or 7 years, maybe more. I fear trips to that office like nothing else, even though I know it’s never as bad as my subconscious brain makes it out to be.
The cleaning wasn’t bad. X-rays revealed that I had three normal cavities and one gi-normous one that the doc thought would need a root canal (!).
The root canal was scheduled for yesterday afternoon, so after dreading the trip all day long, I showed up for the procedure.
He drilled at my tooth for a good 15 minutes (boring away the majority of the tooth itself) and told me it wasn’t deep enough to require the root canal, that a filling would do the trick. So he basically molded a new tooth for me on the excavated area.
I’ve now made a vow with myself to go back for checkups regularly.
The one thing that’s neat about not going for so many years is the light-year leap in dental technology since the last time I went. They’ve got digital, instant read-out x-ray machinery, filling material that’s indistinguishable from actual tooth, and even ways to prenumb the area for the lidocaine shot (or whatever it is they use), so you can’t even feel that pain. Even with all the fear of sitting down in the chair, I was truly impressed with the tech, especially those x-rays I could look at instantly after the snapshots.
Zac’s new living room.
There’s nothing to do here yet but use iPhones.
I purchased a copy of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones sometime back in college, upon recommendation from my dad, who had recently devoured the whole series. It sat there on my shelf for the previous 5 or 6 years, and a number of times I’d picked it up, read the first 20-30 pages, and put it down. Maybe I wasn’t ready for a big fantasy series, but mostly I just hadn’t given it a chance. I started it in early September and finished it in a couple weeks.
On it’s surface, the whole Song of Ice and Fire series looks like run-of-the-mill, Tolkien-rip-off high fantasy. The prologue to Book One really fortifies that impression, too. But once I’d reached chapter 10 or 11, it became clear that Martin was really putting an interesting and original twist on this worn-out genre.
Character development is what makes this series work so well, and causes it to be as addictive as it is. Each chapter is told from the point-of-view of one of the main characters, of which there are many. Until you get to the point in the story where you’re revisiting characters for a second or third time, it’s difficult to see how the plot threads are twisting together. Like other epics, the “family trees” and the geography of the world plays an integral part in your understanding of the events, and that knowledge just takes pages and pages to acquire.
The Lord of the Rings is such a fascinating book — to me — for reasons largely peripheral to the story. The geography and cultures of Middle-earth, and depth of mythology, were the elements that had me reading the deeper histories written by Tolkien. The plot of the “War of the Ring” always seemed like an excuse to showcase this wildly intricate set of languages and mythologies created by the author. With Thrones, for about the first half of the book, I didn’t get the vibe that Martin cared too much about the history of his world. His writing is definitely simpler than Tolkien’s, but Martin does hang a lot of backstory and cultural qualities on the plot over time, it’s just that those elements are not front-and-center. Martin’s concentration is on the family relationships, conspiracies, and intrigue of dozens of characters.
In the last couple weeks I’m about 3/4ths of the way through Book Two, A Clash of Kings. Much darker and more depressing than Thrones, but it’s continuing everything that I love about the series.
Dahli, my niece, chasing Colette around the kitchen.
Flowers at Wynn.
Beautiful Wynn landscaping.
MGM Grand at night.
MGM Grand in daylight.
Lady Liberty at NY-NY.
Hoover Dam.
Intake towers, Hoover Dam.
Bogy’s mark at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
Hollywood Boulevard.
The view from our table at Malibu Seafood.
