I made my biannual visit to the dentist on Tuesday. My dentist is the same one I've had all my life. His office is just around the block from my house and he knows all my family. For instance, he knows my sister is due for a visit and tells me to have her call for an appointment. And he knows my dad is about four years due for an appointment and says "I'd like your dad to come in. Now, it's not that I want to be driving a Porsche or anything but it's about health, you know. It's not that he's got anything to worry about of course, but we'd like to have him come in, say hi."

My dentist always reminds me of a certain For Better or For Worse comic strip that's in one of my mom's books. In that comic there's a married couple and the husband is a dentist. The two are at some kind of fancy party and the whole strip features the wife looking jealously on and the husband chats animatedly to a beautiful young woman with blonde hair, a big, bright smile, and a tight-fitting red dress. At the end of the strip the husband comes over to the wife and says, "She had beautiful teeth!" Because that's all he was looking at.

That's what my dentist is like. He just honestly loves teeth.

He is also bizarrely capable of monologue. I wonder if it's because he's adapted over the years to his patients' inability to respond while he's scraping their teeth or what, but from when he came into the room and after he'd asked me how's school and do I plan to move back to the Bay Area after I graduate (which I answered), he started doing stuff to my teeth and for the next ten minutes or so kept up a full blown monologue about moving back to your hometown, except he wove in this theme of how the salmon return to where they were spawned and he moved back to California, which is where his parents were married right after his dad got out of the navy at the beginning of their trip back to Chicago which was very confusing, plus where his daughters are going to school and the weather. After he finished I was kind of stunned.

Then the hygenist came in and gave me the most painful flossing I've ever had ("Oh, your gums are bleeding. You have to floss those teeth a little better." No, I just floss them below the point of PAIN).

Yesterday I went over to Jason's for dinner. My aunt Jane and cousin Janelle (Jellie) were there already, and we decorated the tree Jason had put up in the back room. Jason had chipped beef on cornbread for dinner, and afterwards Jane and Janelle and I watched Jeopardy while Jason and my uncle Joel tried to get Jason's new picture printer working in the kitchen. Jane knew a lot of the more literary and historical questions. I knew that the University of Georgia's mascot is the bulldogs, something I doubt anyone from Georgia Tech can ever forget. I got many more wrong though. For instance, "The group also known as 'Society of Friends'" is not Ku Klux Klan like I shouted at the screen, but actually the Quakers.

Today I'm doing my holiday baking. So far I've done the divinity, the peanut butter cookies, and the toffee candy. I need more ingredients for the baklava and the seven-layer cookies that my dad admitted last night are some of his favorites. So I might walk to the grocery store after lunch. Get some exercise.