Sunday night BK and I got a sitter and went out for an XXX adult-only dinner. You know, triple-X, the kind where you get to stay in your seat the whole time instead of making laps around the restaurant jiggling a baby teetering on the brink of a meltdown. The kind where you get to slurp down delicious concontions served in martini glasses and polish off bottles of wine with crazy, jacked-up pricing. You know the kind.
Here's the thing about restaurants in Dallas, though. Texas is big, right? There is no urban squeeze to be felt anywhere. Resturants float in the middle of enormous seas of parking -- acres and acres of parking, as far as the eye can see, ready to accomodate your Hummer, your Expedition, your Suburban (old skool!), whatever your boat on wheels of choice is. Never are you faced with block circling, parallel parking, or walking a half-mile from a dubiously legal spot that you did a desperate u-turn in the middle of the road to get.
HOWEVER. When Dallasites go out on the town, they like to do it up right, and you know what that means: valet parking. I cannot convey the rage this inspires in my little heart, which is engulfed in flames of fury every time I witness this ridiculous pretense, only to rise up from its phoenixy ashes to repeat the process next time I drive by III Forks. WHY, AMERICA? WHY? Why would you pay someone to drive your car to a parking spot 50 FUCKING FEET away from the door? Does that really make you feel fancy? Do you stroll inside and order a cosmopolitan and feel all Carrie Bradshaw because some joker in a uniform saved you from that 30-second hike that would have had you feeling all POOR?
Stupid Dallas.
Baxter had a stomach bug this week, though thankfully it was of the 24-hour variety. Poor little guy was running a fever and had the 'rrears pretty bad; when I'd pick him up he'd wearily rest his head on my shoulder, burdened down by the weight of the world. But all is better now and we're back to his typical 15-year-old-in-a-6-month-old's-body attitude of Cuddling is for Chumps, Mom.
I too, suffer, interweb. I've had a nagging, dull ache in one of my molars for weeks now, but I've been studiously avoiding it. In my defense, it comes and goes. Also in my defense, I had a similar ache some three or so years ago when I was planning my wedding, oh most-hated of tasks, and when I went to the dentist I was told that I clench my jaw from stress and that's what causes the pain. So, I stopped clenching and presto! No more ache-o.
This time, though, it's stuck around even though I've been making a concerted effort to avoid the clenching. Visions of root canals danced in my head as I made the trip to the dentist yesterday, but it turns out that my tooths are intact and it's the same old problem. This dentist suggested I invest in a $400 dental mouthguard, and that's when my right eyeball popped out of its socket. After shoving it back in, I heard him tell me that I could also make my way to my local sporting goods store and buy a regular football mouthguard. You'll believe me, internets, when I tell you that neither option A nor B thrills me, as it's been ascertained that my clenching is a daytime activity and I'd have to wear an enormous piece of plastic in my mouth during the day. I think I'll be sticking with my tried and true slack-jaw/Advil/ignore it until it goes away method of dealing with the problem.
Also. Hanging directly in my line of sight on the wall of the examination room there was a shadowbox featuring "Antique Dental Tools," if by "antique" they meant "vicious" and by "dental tools," "instruments of torture." The enormous, curved pliers in particular will haunt my nightmares. Perhaps the intent of the display was nostalgia for old-timey dental days of yore, but the result was more like itchy terror at the thought of an old-timey dentist bracing his foot against my old-timey dental chair as he used a pair of pliers to rip out my old-timey diseased tooth.
