A crowning achievement

Life keeps you on your toes, I can attest to that.

Between the heat and life, there are a million balls in the air right now, on top of us moving in approx 50 days.  Time is starting to become a commodity that we are running out of faster than we want.  

We are down to counting things again.  Trash bags, coffee filters, how many more water bottle coupons we have, even some of the dry goods… Should I get that 5kg bag of rice?  NO!  We won’t come close to using it.  We need red wine vinegar, but the options were a tiny bottle of some high end stuff (70ml for 759 baht - about $25) or a 1.5L bottle for 179 baht (about $5) and we need about 70ml, but for that price???  And the bigger bottle is just waste.

My ADHD and OCD make me well suited to keeping these counts and keeping us as stocked as we need to be for the next 6/7ish weeks.  Also, as the planner and executer of meals, I am the one who needs to “make it work”.  That’s ok, because I have enough tricks that I can invent as I need and we also have Plurn Dee and that might just be our default meal plan for the last week here.

While all this is going on, I had a bit of fun yesterday.

Tuesday night, I was up and gaming a bit.  After that, I wanted a piece of toast and watch a little of The West Wing (guilty pleasure show) before I crashed.  Half way thru my toast, I felt something really hard and then I felt a hole in my teeth.  My crown, the one I got in Vietnam and followed up in BKK with just exploded.  

I spent the morning, yesterday, hunting for a dentist and finding a solution or patch to get me through to Shanghai.  I had my notes and exam papers from both Vietnam and here in BKK and I took those with me.  

Thankfully, the tooth under the crown was still in good shape and we can just re-crown it.  The other good news is that the dentist I saw can rush the crown so Sunday at 15:00h (3pm) I go in to get the new crown placed.  Last good news is that I “paid up” a bit for a full lithium dislicate ceramic crown.  I’ve got another 4 crowns in my mouth, but I’ve always went mid-road and got porcelain fused to metal crowns and even that was a $1500-2000 cost in the States.  I can get a top line crown here, plus exam and all that goes with that for less than 1/4th that.  Also, I trust the dentist I’m seeing here.  The other place I went to back in Sept/Oct was a dentist.  It’s not that I didn’t trust them, but I felt like I was just an ATM for them.  Work with very little care, in and out, done and move on.  

On top of that, the dentist I saw yesterday took the time to read the notes and exam stuff that I brought with me.  She had great English and between that and my Thai, we were able to communicate and I felt like I was part of the process and not just a butt in the chair.  It finally feels like I will “get the tooth done.”  Not that it wasn’t before, but the crown exploded, so I call that a failure.  Also, it was hard to floss there and the crown never felt 100% right.  It’s nothing that I can really explain, other than it felt like it was 99% done with 80% focus.  Think of it like the difference between a burger that you make and grill up in the backyard on a summer day vs a McDs burger.  One is a BURGER and the other is just a McDs burger.  

Other than that, Kiddo and J got to the “park that’s not a park” (I gotta blog about that one day soon) on Monday before Beer came for a bit and they got some wiggles out and had a spot of fun.  We also got the monkey in her natural state of sitting the other day.  Yeah, Kiddo, we call you little monkey for a reason.  LOL

Lastly, a bit of housekeeping from the last post-

1. 15,000 vendors, not 1500.  That zero makes a difference.
2. J misspoke.  She curates our adventures, I narrate or chronicle them.  
3. Talen coffee, I forgot to mention when we got our coffee, the woman who gave it to us came out of the stall to hand it to us.  She asked Kiddo how old she was, in Thai.  Kiddo is still hesitant to use Thai and so was shy and quiet about it.  The woman then switched to English and she, we found out, is a teacher aide at an English school in BKK (J got the name, I can’t remember which school she said) and her and J chatted for a minute about that and about Kiddo.  You just never know who you are going to bump into or what they are really about until you try and chat a minute.

Let’s go, Kiddo… We are one day closer to our last day, to our summer, to your first MLB game, to Mexico, to the next adventure.  We are going to have a surprise for you in CA, but that can wait for now.  We can’t wait to explore more of the world with you and feed you tacos.  Also, you will get to try steak.  I wonder what other oddities and adventures we will find this summer, but as long as you are there to explore and experience it with us, we’ll count it as a win.