After the joys and the toil of hosting our daughter Sarah and family's stay with us last weekend, first there has been a day of exhaustion (Monday), followed by a day of near-exhaustion(Tuesday) for Lois and me.
Yikes, we're getting old, no doubt about that!
Today is a day of anxiety, not of exhaustion, however, because we've got to pay our first visit to our new dentist down at Barnard's Green, Malvern, for our initial examinations. Yikes (again) !!!!!
dentophobia strikes again - yikes !!!!!
Although we moved from Cheltenham to Malvern at the end of October 2022, we've kept our old dentist in Cheltenham, partly because I was in the middle of a course of treatment. However, we've become fed up with driving 25 miles to visit the dentist, and we decided last week to enroll with a dental surgery about a mile away, down at Barnard's Green. Annoyingly, however, we have to keep paying our monthly instalments on the Cheltenham dental surgery's payment plan, because the benefits of the new Malvern one won't kick in till July, which is annoying to put it mildly - damn!
Lois "is taken first", which leaves me on my own
to sit in the waiting-room: yikes !!!! [That's enough yikeses! - Ed]
By 12:30 pm, however, we're both out of there, and what do you know? No real problems detected, just a couple of things "to keep an eye on".
It shows the value of humming (not out loud) the great magic spells of Brian Wilson's song "Don't worry - everything will turn out all right".
And, as a back-up, to make the spell even more powerful, we hum, silently, Bobby McFerrin's equally powerful spell, "Don't worry, be happy". You see, it works every time (except occasionally, when it doesn't, of course).
The on-screen entertainment proves to be a slide show of teeth problems, which is a bit off-putting, but this is counterbalanced on the soundtrack by a nice mix of 1990's hits, which Lois and I can just about remember, like Sheryl Crow's "All I wanna do is have some fun, I've got a feeling I'm not the only one", which is a good theme for dental patients, who are perhaps feeling a little glum.
Another good sign this morning is that almost all the patients we see are old codgers [Don't you mean "other old codgers? - Ed], so we're all "serious cases for treatment" - and not just a bunch of people coming in to buy the cosmetic smile that will get them a wide choice of dates among candidates from the opposite sex (or from the same sex, depending on taste), which is nice!
12:30 We emerge into the sunshine, feeling relieved and surprised - and you would not BELIEVE how much haha!
we emerge into broad, sunlit uplands - our ordeal is over,
and no harm done, which is nice!
13:00 We come home and have lunch, And we discover that, away from our own dental anxieties, today is a big day news-wise, no doubt about that.
There are 2 absolutely massive stories today on Onion News, the influential American news web-site.
I expect that, like me, you've seen tonight's early evening news and the interviews with "pale, weird kid" Kevin, not to mention all those interviews with the brave scientists who, amazingly, found representatives of approximately 360,000 threatened insect species under Kevin's pillow.
Almost unbelievable, isn't it!
scientists in Germany reporting yesterday the huge number of
threatened insect species found under "pale, weird kid" Kevin's pillow
Then, after that bombshell, we get the incredible outpourings of emotion from job-candidate Timothy Sellers, Expressing concern that he might have played up his facility with witchcraft and dark magic a little too much at the expense of other qualifications, Sellers confesses tonight that he might have mentioned sorcery a few too many times during a recent job interview.
remorseful job candidate Timothy Sellers
recounting his embarrassing performance at a job interview yesterday
“It seemed to go pretty well, but maybe I should have made fewer references to the various arcane and esoteric rites I have mastered,” said Sellers, wondering aloud whether it would have been better to include Photoshop and Excel on his résumé’s special skills section instead of necromancy and incantations.
“I definitely hit it off with the hiring manager—but I’m not sure he followed when I described how my clairvoyance and occult powers could be useful in forecasting market trends, or how certain conjuring rituals could be applied to supply-chain problems. Hopefully the evil eye I gifted him at the end was enough for him to overlook all that.”
Let's hope for Timothy's sake that the hiring manager takes a sympathetic line here. Tim sounds like a nice guy, and Lois and I would hate to see him miss out on this at-first-sight incredible job opportunity just because of an otherwise creditable overabundance of sorcery skills.
We're both rooting for you, Tim!
But what a crazy world we live in, don't we !!!!!!
18:30 A phone call from our daughter Sarah, who returned to the UK about 3 weeks ago with husband Francis and their 9-year-old twins. The family are currently trying to buy a house near Evesham, where Sarah has recently resumed the job with her old accountancy firm - the job she gave up in 2015 when the family moved to Perth, Australia.
our daughter Sarah, plus husband Francis, and their 9-year-old
twins Lily and Jessica, seen relaxing a couple of weeks ago
in the pool at the local Malvern Splash leisure complex
Sarah spoke to us last night and revealed her concerns about new problems with the house deal. She sounds more positive tonight, but she still hasn't had a chance to talk to the family's solicitor. She'll be making another attempt tomorrow. However, things may be looking up possibly.
18:45 We settle down on the couch and watch last night's repeat of an old "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads" sitcom episode from the early 1970's, all about young Tynesiders Terry and Bob, rekindling their friendship after Terry's 5 years in the Army in Germany, with Terry trying to see if any of his old flames from 5 years ago will agree to go out on a date with him.
Terry finds some of his previous girlfriends' phone numbers in his old 1967 diary, in which he also gave each girl a "rating" of 1 to 7 stars. Sadly, however, none of his former girlfriends seems keen to go out with him five years later, which he finds incredibly disappointing, not surprisingly.
Still that's life isn't it! And Terry has to confess to Bob the disappointing results of his phone-calls.
Terry (right), newly discharged from the army tries ringing some of
his local "old flames", with spectacularly disappointing results
At the same time it's nostalgic, however, for Lois and me to hear again the details of the old 1960's "ratings system" that was used in those crazy, far-off days, to assess teenage girlfriends and boyfriends - the so-called "British Standard", as Bob recalls later, sitting on the sofa with his fiancée Thelma.
Later, however, Thelma confesses that she does remember it all in fact, but she adds that all the boys in any case used to exaggerate their exploits. "Take away two stars and you've probably got a more realistic assessment", she says.
Lois and I discuss this. Perhaps Thelma is on to something here. And perhaps social historians could subtract 2 stars from contemporary accounts to give perhaps a more credible picture of alleged "achievements" by teenagers of the period.
I wonder..... !
19:30 Lois disappears into the kitchen-diner to take part in her church's monthly Business Meeting on zoom.
a typical example of a business meeting held by Lois's church,
from the era before online zoom meetings came into vogue, i.e. before the pandemic
And my goodness it's a humdinger of a meeting tonight, no mistake about that, going on for two and a half hours.
From upstairs in the bedroom, where I'm taking a rare [???!! - Ed] opportunity to relax, I can hear the occasional impassioned contributions going full-tilt on the laptop downstairs, as well as the more measured ones - my goodness! I can only pick up the occasional word, but I can guess what it must be about - one of the members who's been dividing opinion, and who is temporarily barred.
Oh dear - poor Lois, having to sit through two and a half hours of all that, at the age of (nearly) 77 ! And poor younger church-members also, who've probably been working all day, and then have to have an evening of that sort of debate to sit through on top of it - oh dear (again) !!!!!
22:00 Lois finally emerges. We decide we've got nothing left to give to the day and might as well surrender and go to bed - slapping a happy ending on the day at least, which is nice!
[Isn't 10 pm your normal going-to-bed time anyway? - Ed]
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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