Summer Travel Map

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Today’s the Big Day

January 29, 2008
Peoria, AZ

Yesterday was an easy day. Geri did some house cleaning and had her Physical Therapy appointment in the afternoon. I cleaned up some “paperwork” (so many things are electronic these days that term really doesn’t apply) in the study, including finalizing changes to many online accounts due to a new expiration date for a credit card. The convenience of having bills taken care of automatically is great, but a simple thing like getting a new card due to expiration can cause a whole bunch of work. It’s surprising how many places financial information is stored, even if we try to minimize it for security purposes. You’d think that card issuers and payees would come up with a way to automatically update expiration date changes.

What’s even more surprising is the number of places I had to call because I couldn’t change the expiration online. This is goofy. If automatic payments can be set up online, you should be able to change them. Of course, the other end of the spectrum has web sites that show an alert when you log on (“Your credit card expires this month. Click here to update the expiration date.”) and make it very easy. If they’d just push this into an email, I’d be a happy guy.

Today is Geri’s tooth extraction. In fact, I’m writing this as I sit in the periodontist’s waiting room. Her appointment was at 8:00 AM. We walked in the door at 7:58 and she didn’t even have a chance to sit down before they whisked her back. This tooth has been bothering her for well over a year now, so it’s really a good thing that she’s getting it removed. It’s a rear molar that anchors a bridge, so there will be follow-up work to insert two implants, and it’ll all involve some pain and expense, but the relief from the ongoing pain, discomfort, and infections will be worth it.

Scheduling on all this will be a little tricky, but it should work out OK if there are no complications. Since the tooth being removed won’t get an implant (just the two in front of it, where the current bridge is, will), extraction site healing won’t be an issue and she should be able to get the implants installed in March, after we get back from our next trip. This assumes that a bone graft isn’t required to build up the area for the implants; we’re keeping our fingers crossed that grafting isn’t needed.

Once the implants are in, it’ll be back to the primary dentist for the caps that go on them. Everybody gets a piece of the wallet. We’ve gotten a couple of different estimates on the timing there: the dentist said 4-6 weeks and the implant guy said 4-6 months. If the former is true, we might try to push to get all this done before we leave for the summer. If the latter is true, the caps will be on hold until we get back in the fall. I suppose we’ll know more about that once we see how the extraction is evaluated, and have a chance to schedule the next step.

Other than all this, things have been quiet. I used the rainy days as an excuse to get the bread machine out and made a halfway decent rustic loaf, which is already gone (must have been OK). We signed up for a spot at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta again, and the check cleared for that so it looks like we made the cut (this group is limited to 80 coaches). We enjoyed the Fiesta in 2006, and are looking forward to going again. This time, we’ll be with a group of Monaco coaches (last time, we were with the Escapees group) and are supposed to have much better parking spots. Our friends Wayne and Eva have signed up as well, so we’ll have a chance to catch up with them after summer travels.

Well, that’s about it for this morning. Geri should be done soon, and I’ll post a follow-up later.

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