Sheep Guarding Llama

Today I return to the doctor for the checkup about my teeth. I am feeling pretty good today – best improvement that I have felt yet. I actually feel like I can eat pretty much like normal today. Loopy and I are working on getting our finished Evil Petting Zoo stuff published and available from IUMA.com (Internet Underground Music Archive.) We have four completed songs and a remix that we are putting up there. All stuff that you can download from here but there are other formats available there. The site will hopefully be carrying us in about a week or so. They are slow because of the holidays.

I got a new winter coat for Christmas! For those of you who know me, this is a big deal. You can now, occasionally, see me actually wearing a coat. Although there is still no snow on the ground here. Quite a warm December for New York. I don’t know quite what to think of it. I hear that Buffalo got some snow a few days ago but there is no sign of it here or back home near Perry.

Since I have switched to eating vegetarian in September, I have lost about twenty pounds! Some of that has happened since the food poisoning and teeth removal a week ago but I will take it any way I can get it.

Dominica has been studying “Your Mom” humor from Nate and Loopy and is finally coming along. She is making some pretty funny jokes. Ask her, maybe she will give you a sample.

Only four more days until New Year’s Eve!

On Christmas Day, Nate, Bob, Loopy and my families all watched Thumb Wars completely seperate from each other. How funny is that. Dominica is taking a copy to her parents today so that they can watch it too. Nate and my families also both watched the Princess Diaries on Christmas too! The Diaries were ok. Nate really liked it but I was a little bit disappointed.

My parents got me a year’s supply of Wegman’s antacids for Christmas. It looks like I am going to be needing them this year:) There is so much work to be done.

10:00 am tomorrow I am taking the Microsoft SQL Server 7 Administration exam in Syracuse. This is a really big and hard exam. I am a little bit nervous. I don’t know if I am ready or not but I want to get this over and done with before the beginning of the new year. This exam will award me the MCSE+I, Microsoft’s highest honor. I have been working towards this one for a long time. I hope that I will be all done with it by this time tomorrow. It would be very nice to not have to worry about this test any longer.

Well, we finally have the Evil Petting Zoo stuff up and available for download on the music page. After all of this time. Only MP3s are available right now. More will be available later. Go and download some of our stuff. This stuff is cool. Loopy and I (mostly Loopy) made this music around 1998 during our working at the Days Inn Rochester Thruway days. What an exciting time that was. Anyway, this music is the best stuff we have to remember those days by. Those were great days. Most of this stuff was created on my old Digital Starion Pentium 75 computer running DOS with 24MB of memory. This music was made with Impulse Tracker. If you are interested in tracking, contact DJ Loopy, he is the man.

Happy Boxing Day! In Canada, they celebrate the Feast of St. Stephens the day after Christmas. So we here at Sheep Guarding Llama celebrate it also. And contrary to popular belief, Boxing Day is not the day we celebrate returning unwanted Christmas gifts.

Ok, one last quick update before I hit the road for the holidays. On Saturday, Dominica made it to Rochester to pick up her new 2002 Mazda PR5, automatic, Midnight Blue Mica with a moon roof. That is the fourth Mazda in six months for the llamas. While Dominica is unable to drive because of her back, I am driving her new car!

My teeth aren’t doing too badly. I am getting better slowly. I have given up on eating solid foods as they get packed into the empty sockets and that really hurts. Right now I have a bit a black pepper stuck in there and it is pretty uncomfortable. But I am figuring out how to deal with them a little bit better everyday. I have to go back for a one week check up on Thursday.

Well, I hope that everyone has a happy holidays. I will see many of you on New Year’s Eve and some of you over Christmas in Perry. Updates might resume sometime this week. I am expecting to be in Ithaca on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday through New Year’s Eve, I will be working in Rochester with Eric, John and Dad.

Natalie and Miranda, our Canadian contingency, will be arriving on our “shores” in just six days. They will be here for the Llama New Year’s Bash and then traveling to see the sites in New York City with Josh and I on January 2nd and 3rd. I added this information since there hasn’t been a Canadian update all during the month of December. I didn’t want them to feel left out without a Canadian flag on the main page. Natalie pointed out to me that the points on the Maple Leaf on the Canadian flag each represent one of the provinces.

January 4th is the Kelley’s Heroes Christmas Party. I add this for those band members who don’t pay attention to their emails.

Ok, so my teeth are out now. They definitely are hurting pretty badly but not nearly as badly as everyone thought that they would have. I am able to eat already. Although I am not able to eat anything that I want and I am incredibly cold sensitive so ice cream is completely out of the question. Overall I am feeling pretty well, though. I think that I all ready have some stuff caught in the spaces though. Ugh. It is better than I thought it would be though. I am going to go to see the opening night of Lord of the Rings with Josh, Montana Bob and Loopy in Binghamton tonight (great memories of having my teeth out today in Binghamton.) I managed to see the movie the other night at the preview in Ithaca. It is really good, but very long. I recommend that everyone goes to see this movie because it is one of the best of the season. The computer graphics (CG not CGI which is the name of a magazine and a web technology) were pretty poor though. They were really disappointing after some of the good computer graphics that have been out in Final Fantasy, Shrek and Monsters, Inc. Also, Josh told me that Final Fantasy X is out for the PS2 so anyone who is waiting for it can run out and get it now.

Anne update number nine is available today. I already have it posted and re-capitalized since she is too lazy to put in her own capital letters 🙂 One of these days I will actually get that Bio section up and running. I am in pain so now is not a good time.

Dominica and I celebrated Christmas today since we are both sick and stuck not doing anything. I got a new Game Boy Advance with Breath of Fire. I am very excited about that. I got her some stuff that she really can’t use because her back is in such bad shape. So Christmas wasn’t very exciting for her. We aren’t quite done yet since travel is hard and some of the gifts are in different locations.

Only four more days until Christmas. See a lot of you at Brick Presbyterian on Christmas Eve.

Well, today is the big day. All four wisdom teeth are coming out. This will be my first ever attempt at oral surgery. I haven’t been able to eat since last night. And I have not had any water since the middle of the night.

Loopy is driving me down to the surgeon in a little while. He is going to have a really exciting day, when he brings me back from surgery he has to almost immediately turn around and drive Dominica to the chiropractor. She had her X-Rays examined more thoroughly yesterday and she has a pinched and a compressed disc in her back. So she is in worse shape that we had thought. Dominica is off of work at least until January. Bob is still sick too. His flu is going on and on.

On top of everybody being sick, my mother had a car accident yesterday and may have totaled her car. She is ok, though. I have not been able to get a hold of my parents to find out the details of what is happening.

The Calc II final seemed to go ok. It is all over now no matter what. No more classes for at least a month. Whoo-hoo! Tim is already done for the semester. Nate and Bob are done on Friday.

Not much news beyond that. The RX-7 is in terrible shape after picking it up from Ontario Mazda this week but it limped into storage and is done for the winter. In the spring we will figure out what to do with it. Dominica’s new blue PR5 is in and we are supposed to be picking it up for her on Saturday (she can’t drive so I have to drive it!)

Looking Back [Written May 15, 2009] – As you can imagine, I did not end up writing all that much about having my wisdom teeth removed as I was busy with other things.

Andy (Loopy) drove me down to Johnson City, New York for my wisdom teeth removal in the late afternoon.  Beacuse all four teeth are coming out together the decision was made to just put me under and do the entire thing that way rather than using a local anesthetic and making me be awake for the whole thing.  I am very thankful for that.  I’ve never so much as had a cavity so this would have been rather a shocking experience.

Andy waited for me during the surgery which did not take all that long.  I was feeling pretty good when it was done and I was allowed to eat whatever I could get down.  I was starving since I had not eaten in a whole day and having been under full anesthesia gives you the munchies.

The oral surgeon told me to go get super extra ultra strength Tylenol and to start using it right away before the anesthesia completely wore off because I would be really sorry if I did not.  I told him that I was not interested and that he need not write a prescription for me but he insisted so I took the script, but I decided to not even get it filled as there was no way that I was going to take medicine for a little tooth surgery.

As we left the doctor I told Andy that I was really hungry and wanted to go to McDonald’s.  Andy was a bit incredulous but decided that if that was what I wanted then that was what we were going to get – crazy as it may seem.  So we went to McDonald’s where I got a Big Mac and a large French fry.  I had very little problem eating it either.  It was fine.

We got back to the house on Observatory Circle in Varna.  I relaxed for the evening while Andy drove Dominica out to her chiropractor appointment.  He is quite busy today carting us around.