Migraine
Since my last update, I had a 5 day migraine. While it wasn't a long one, it was pretty bad all days as none of them would have been possible to work through. Part of that though is because of the root canal, and that's a story for further below. For the most part I still believe I'm seeing gains since starting the Paxil and I hope that the new neurologist can interpolate that into an improved treatment.
Mental Health
I saw my therapist last week. We had another good session. Well, I'm not sure I'd call it a GOOD session. It was a session where I was in a good mood. I still had a migraine, but we just chatted for an hour. At the end of the session, I admitted that I'd like goals for our sessions. He quickly said that while my ultimate goal is to get rid of the migraines, he thinks setting up goals in-between now and that would help. So, that's our topic of conversation next week.
Physical Health
The root canal is finally over. The short of it is that it eliminated the dental pain. Days after the procedure, once all the swelling has gone down, I have no pain coming from the tooth, can brush the tooth without pain, and can even chew on it.
The longer story has some interesting parts. Of course it came on a migraine day. As the dental hygenist took me back, I told her that I have a migraine and that the procedure is going to make it worse. I even mentioned that my migraines extend to over 20 days a month and are stopping me from working. Part of me thinks that I should have not mentioned that. I should have just said I had a headache instead. I say that because a lot of the time was spent with them trying to get rid of the migraine, even after I told them that there wasn't a way to eliminate it.
One thing I like about the endodontist as opposed to the dentist is that they go through the extra steps to keep your mouth open and even put a dam in your mouth to keep the fluids out of the back of your throat. Once you get used to the piece of rubber in your mouth, making mouth breathing problematic, it's nice to sit back and 'relax'. I'm not focused on NOT swallowing and I'm not focused on keeping my mouth open. The little rubbing triangle that they put in between my right upper and lower teeth was something I could actually clench down on which helped. Pulling it out was a little bit more effort than it should have been, but that's because I was more or less biting down on it for a couple hours (yeah... it took two hours).
I knew that this particular endodontist didn't work with my insurance. I just forgot how that worked out. I was expecting to pay between $3,000 and $5,000 up front and then having to right my dental insurance. But while they don't accept the dental insurance, they DO send the billing in. When I was all done, they told me I was to pay the $1,800 and that my insurance would return a little over $800 back to me. So where I was ready to pay up to $5,000 it's only going to cost me a little under $1,000 out of pocket. Not bad!
They also went over dental implants with me. I initially wanted to talk to them about dental implants as a precaution in case the root canal didn't work and they had to pull that molar out. Remember, it's a lone molar with no tooth on either side. So if it came out, I'd want not only a dental implant to replace it, I'd go ahead and get another for the space in front of it and have my teeth 'complete' for the first time in many years. But when the root canal was done he showed me a 3D scan they did of my mouth and it looks like the bone under the empty tooth space has deteriorated and I might not ever be able to have a dental implant there now. He said at the best case scenario, I'd be able to have one, but it wouldn't be a big enough of an implant to fill the empty space.
Ah well, it's not like I went to him to try and fix that problem.
Next up is seeing my dentist to get the permanent crown in as I still have the temporary crown in. At that point I'll sign up for whatever he wants to do next. I think it will be another crown. So far I've had four crowns, three of which required root canals after the fact. I think I'll talk to him about planning on a root canal as it's rough to go through the dental crown process, wait until the permanent one comes in, realize the pain is still there, schedule an appointment with an endodontist that's weeks away, and end up having to deal with a lot of pain for over a month. Why not just assume it's going to happen and get it knocked out at the same time?
We'll see what he says.
Finances
I finally got word from my long term disability company saying that if I need an extension, I need to submit new paperwork. New medical paperwork. Of course I received this on Christmas Eve. My neurologist's office is open, but only for a couple days between now and the New Year.
As I couldn't do anything on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day I just ignored it and set it aside. I'll look at it today and deal with it. At least the current approved time goes THROUGH December, so I'll get paid one more time and have most of January to catch up.
Family/Friends
We ended up having a very good Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. While the holidays are radically different than they were when I was a child, we have our modern traditions. Christmas Eve is for our full family. Mom, my brother R, and me, plus my brother B and his family. Mom makes us Christmas stockings with all kinds of cheesy toys and such that's honestly a lot of fun to go through and is fun for her to purchase (it used to be at local stores, but it's now all online). R, B, and me get Mom a gift. And for the past few years, my niece has gotten R and me gifts. We have some cheesy potato soup, some crab dip, some spinach dip, crackers, a cheese plate, a veggie plate, and a olive and pickle plate. Plus of course all the Christmas cookies for desert. After eating and exchanging gifts we've played trivia games for the past six years or so (Jackbox games like Murder Mystery Party and You Don't Know Jack that can be played on the TV while everyone uses their phone as controllers) and it's a lot of fun.
Both R and I helped mom prep everything and then hung out with her while waiting for B and his family to come over. Lunch was ate almost immediately and was just lovely. The crab dip, a staple from mom for years and years now, was a little different as we used the normal finely minced crab as well as larger chunks of it. It was SO good! And yes, we use fake crab (or Krab with a C as we used to call it). We tried real crab once, but it tasted so different that we gave up on it.
Gift wise it was pretty simple. Mom had said she wanted a new flatware set, so I talked to her about it and got her to delay purchasing something until 'after the new year' so we could go out and find a store that sold them so we could touch them and see if we liked them in person. Yeah... that was a decoy so that R, B, and I could get her that as the Christmas gift this year. And they are surprisingly high quality. I've given my nephews and niece Amazon gift cards for years now, currently at $150 each. I'd go higher but since mom, their grandma, gives them $200 in cash, I don't want to step on that and will leave the 'big money' to come from her. My niece got me a four pack of a local breweries beer. I loved the thought that went into it as she knows I'm kind of bougie when it comes to things like that. The only sad thing is she doesn't know my particular tastes and got me a lager, a withier, and two indian pale ales or IPAs. It took me years to figure out that I can't drink IPAs. They straight up make me sick. It's something about how they react in my stomach as they make a TON of gas. At best, I burp painfully when I drink them, but more often than not, the burping turs into puking. So really, she got me two beers. I still love it though as it took genuine thought and I love her for that.
When it came to games this year, I had discussed it with mom and was disappointed as Jackbox games didn't have anything new this year. I mean, it's not a terrible loss or anything. We can play through the other four games we have as we'll still not likely get the same questions since we only play it once a year. But it still sucked as I've bought the 'new' collection every year for several years now. We solved that by the fact that Mom bought my sister in law a 'Wicked' Monopoly game. Yes, it's based on the Wicked movie but has the same general mechanics of Monopoly. I guess B and his family play monopoly fairly often and he always wins. Once we had the rules established and started playing, with B acting as banker to 'keep things fair' it quickly became clear who was going to win in his stead. Me.
B and his family had to leave soon after that as they had to have their own family Christmas Eve and B had to get ready for work on Christmas Day.
A few weeks back Mom, R, and I decided we'd have a prime rib for Christmas Day. We wouldn't have any guests and wouldn't be going anywhere so we'd just have a simple but luxurious dinner together. Prime Rib, baked potato and salad. When ordering the prime rib, mom called the local meat market that we normally use and asked if we could pre-order it (making sure we wouldn't be out in the cold without a good piece of meat, or having to buy it early and freeze it). They said they could and she ordered one with "five or six bones" prepped. Prepping it was cutting the bones off and then tying them back onto the bottom of the rib for cooking and putting a spice rub on it. It was $12 a pound and we figured it would be a little more for the prep work (either a flat fee or a few dollars more per pound).
I went out Christmas Eve morning to pick it up and was shocked when they brought it out. I was expecting something in the 5 to 7 pound range. Something perfectly sized for the three of us with enough left overs for prime rib sandwiches the next day. We even talked about if it was too much bigger than that, we'd cut it in half and have it for New Year's Day as well. Well, it WAS bigger. It was twenty two fucking pounds! It was MASSIVE!
The good was that they still only charged $12 a pound. The bad is that it was just over $250 dollars!
Cooking wise, we used a recipe from Bobby Flay. Instead of using his rub we obviously used the meat market's rub, but we followed Bobby's instructions for cooking and making the au jus. The first problem? Bobby said to cook a 5 to 7 pound rib roast. We cut ours in half, one for Christmas, one for New Year's and cooked the smaller portion but it was still over 10 pounds. I think his recipe was to cook it at 300 degrees for a couple hours "or until it's 135 degrees inside". We have a great thermometer so that would be easy, but we figured it would be longer than 2 hours because of the size difference. At 2 hours, it was only 90 degrees in the center. Another half hour, it was 95 degrees. We realized this was going to be bad as at that rate it'd take another 4 or 5 hours to cook and we absolutely didn't want much rarer than what Bobby Flay wanted. So we turned the temp up to 400 degrees and found several other recipes that said to cook it to 125 for "rare to medium rare". That was our new goal. It ended up taking about three and a half hours but my Goddess, did it come out perfect.
R cut it up into three equal pieces, meaning we each had over three pounds of perfectly cooked prime rib and au jus. Here's some photos he took:
Notice please that the 'piece' of prime rib completely covers a dinner plate. And while it's not easy to see with the straight down photo R took, that piece of meat was about three inches thick. In total, I was able to eat about two thirds of the middle 'rare' part before I was absolutely full. No baked potato, no salad, no desert. Just a ton of meat and au jus!
Heaven!
Entertainment
One of my favorite movies from the 90s has always been 'Payback' starting Mel Gibson. In a nutshell, he's a professional robber who gets shot in the back by his buddy and his wife and left for dead. He survives, comes back, and hunts them down for his share of their latest score going up against the mob. It's dark and gritty and funny and that particular flavor of noir that only existed in the late 90s.
I'd seen recently that there was a directors cut of Payback put out in 2006 called 'Payback: Straight Up' that was a complete recut of the movie. The story is that the director Brian Helgeland was fired when the film was almost done because he didn't want to take the studio's notes. Well, it was finished by another director. This, the 'Straight Up' version, is Brian Helgeland's original version. It's processed different so it has a whole different color tone, it has a new soundtrack, and not only edits a lot of the humor out, it changes the ending completely. I've seen plenty of director's cuts before, but this has to be the most dramatically different director's cut. Even Zack Snyder's Justice League isn't that much different compared to Jos Wheadon's version. At least in my opinion.
Another good director's cut of a movie I saw was 'Leon: The Professional'. Evidently, the version that's been out for years and years was the 'original' that had been cut up for American audiences. This new one has like 20 minutes of new footage. Like most director's cut it doesn't tell a new story, but the parts that are now in it make it a little more ambiguous as to the relationship between Leon and Matilda. Matilda, if you didn't know, is played by a 12 year old Natalie Portman and in the movie she has a 'crush' on Leon after he saves her. In this director's cut, its way beyond a crush and she's asking him to actually have sex with her. And while in the original cut he play at training her in his assassin like ways, this version makes that far more explicit.
Both versions are good and you don't exactly get a different movie out of it like in Payback and Payback: Straight Up, but it's still a pretty different feel for the movie.
I really can't go past tis 'entertainment' section without mentioning watching TV with mom on Christmas. I wanted to just spend time with her instead of going into my room and falling into my computer or movies or The Americans or something else.
When she was flipping through the TV Guide looking for something to watch I spoke up when I saw that Superman II was on. I didn't really mean to watch it, but she thought that's what I meant and put it on. Well... wow. That movie is SO old. It's cheesy beyond comparison. Afterward I told her that she should find a Hallmark Christmas movie as she loves watching those... but she didn't. Instead she started her normal TV viewing as if it were any other Wednesday. Some nature shows, a local TV talk show, the local news, the national news, and inside edition with brief interruptions of MSNBC and CNN. After the meat heavy meal, I finally fell asleep on the couch.
When I woke up, mid way through the news and inside edition, I continued to hang out and let mom just watch what she wanted until it was clear that she didn't know what to watch. She put on a repeat of NCIS, which she watches regularly, but figured out it was one that she'd seen. When she brought the guide back up I asked if she'd like to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" which is my favorite Christmas movie. In truth, if I knew what Hallmark Christmas movies mom HADN'T seen, I'd have asked if she wanted to see one of those, but I have no idea which one she would like to see but hasn't. So that's how we ended Christmas Day, watching It's a Wonderful Life. I love that movie!
New Tech
The temporary setup of my laptop worked fine. It's only major problem was it flashing black screens whenever a video started playing. Problematic for my daily doom scrolling on Threads and such as a lot of those posts have videos playing, which means it blanks out on each little bit of scrolling I do.
But, the day before Thanksgiving, Falcon Northwest got me my updated USB Thumb Drive. Before, when I formatted and restored this computer, it took about two hours. This time? Three minutes. Seriously, from putting the drive in and booting to it, to booting up to Windows 11 Pro on the hard drive took about three minutes. I'm not sure if the drive being faster could account for that big of a difference and now have to assume that not only was the data corrupted on the old USB recover drive, but maybe the drive itself was bad. I'm not going to sit on it for months/years and forget about my suspicions only to lose data on it. Instead I think I'll just throw it away to be safe.
Now, resetting up Windows may have only took 3 minutes, but getting my data bac in place and getting all my programs installed and getting all the settings just right took the rest of the day.
That evening when I was almost done, I installed a game that my brother R had been playing with my nephews. It's a Diablo clone called Path of Exile 2. First, it's not done. It's in early access and probably won't be done until summer. Second, it's absolutely gorgeous. With the 14900k processor and the 4090 RTX video card I'm able to play it at full ultra settings at 4K and not go below 120 frames per second (which is as fast as my OLED monitor can go). That being said, I've never been a huge Diablo fan. It's fun enough that I can play it, but my primary reason for playing it will be to hang out with R and the nephews.
Writing
Not writing for the past week or so has been tough. I'm not saying that I'd have written every day, but without it being an option because of the computer situation made me WANT to write every day. Now that the system is back up, I'll be writing more soon.
Michigan Football
Michigan's bowl isn't until next week, but I did watch all of initial round of playoff games. I personally think this system is going to be a lot of fun and is great. And my GOD can people bitch about it. First, yes all of the games were blowouts. Notre Damn killed Indiana, Penn State slammed SMU, Texas stomped Clemson, and Ohio State just shit all over Tennessee. But while people complain about it, I think they forget how many blow outs there were in the four team playoff. But compared to that, this time these games are played on Campus!!! Indiana and Notre Dame was cool as Indiana fans only had to drive a couple hours to see their team play. SMU, a team from Dallas, played in a Nittany Lion White out in 25 degree weather and Tennessee had to play in 25 degree weather in the Horseshoe. It was glorious!
People also are now complaining about the seeding. They say that Oregon, the number one team in the country and Georgia, the number two team in the country, are screwed because they end up playing harder teams in Ohio State and Notre Dame as opposed to Boise State and Arizona State. All I'd say to that is that a couple years ago #2 Michigan had to play #3 TCU in the semis when #1 Georgia had to play #4 Ohio State. Michigan had the 'easier' path, right? Well, TCU beat them and then went on to get slaughtered by a Georgia team in the national championship game that barely beat Ohio State. Mismatches happen. It's why we play the fucking games! Michigan absolutely shouldn't have beat Ohio State this year, but we played the game and Michigan won! So let's play the games and enjoy them.
Computer Issues
So, there's been two ongoing issues. Apple Music being weird and locking up on certain songs and the background/wallpaper changing from a slide show to a single image when I change desktops.
The sound issue is slowly taken care of as any time it locks up I go to the song tripping it up, remove the download, start playing it (streaming since it's not downloaded) and then download it again. Voila, it doesn't lock up on that song again. It took months to get the computer cleared up before. When I went to the laptop, it didn't have that issue at all.
The wallpaper thing isn't something that came up on the laptop as I didn't use multiple desktops on it before. It was primarily a D&D computer. But once it was replacing my primary computer where I wanted to have multiple desktops, it happened there too. And remember, it had cleared up on the desktop without any problem solving from me.
Now that I've formatted and reinstalled the Desktop, I have/had both issues back in full strength. I couldn't go through ten minutes of music without Apple Music locking up. And as soon as I started playing with multiple desktops, it started changing from my slideshow to a single image. BUT, between me starting this update post and now, the wallpaper issue has resolved itself.
While I hate saying this, I have to accept that I have no idea what's causing these problems. And since they are annoyances rather than actual problems, there isn't any reason for me to worry about them. I'll just deal with the music as it comes up and hope that the wallpaper issue doesn't come back.
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