Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Crown

Yesterday at lunch, part of a tooth chipped off. It wasn't painful, and I didn't even notice until my tongue felt something weird along the side of a molar. Or more accurately, felt something missing... as in the back corner of a tooth. I remember a dentist once telling me that I would probably have to have a crown eventually, since that one tooth had 2 or 3 fillings in it, making the tooth weak. Well, that day came to pass!

Since it didn't hurt and I could eat and chew normally, I briefly entertained the idea of not doing anything about it. But I knew the now-exposed side of the filling would eventually cause problems, so I made an appointment ASAP. Which turned out to be this morning.

My dentist took a quick look and said "yes, you need a crown. Ceramic or gold?" Apparently the gold/metal choice is better since it will be far less likely to crack, while the ceramic one is mostly for aesthetic reasons (e.g. a visible tooth needs a crown). I opted for the gold crown since my molar really isn't that visible.

Now I have a temporary crown, and have to go back in two weeks to get fitted for the permanent crown.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Bike Class

My bike club decided, at the last club meeting, that it would be good for the club to send interested people to take the "safety class" offered by the League of American Bicyclists, just for general knowledge. Any safety tips would be valuable, especially for ride leaders, or people that help marshall other rides, etc.

So I signed up. The first part of the class was OK, mostly topics like general bike safety, and entirely lecture based. Due to a schedule conflict, I wound up taking the second part today, and it was much more fun.

Today's the class started out with lecture and slides, but the topics were more interesting, since they were directly about road position: where to position a lone cyclist or group of cyclists, in various traffic situations. The general idea is to think of ourselves as a slow moving vehicle - we obey all traffic signs, take the rightmost lane that serves our destination, etc. The slides covered more complicated scenarios that before, such as handling a fork in the lane.

But what made today's class most fun was practicing maneuvers in the parking lot: quick turning, emergency stopping, swerving to miss small objects, etc. After that we went on a ~15 mile loop to practice everything. We even had a quiz over the material.

I passed both the quiz and the bike portion, so I'll get my certificate along with the others in the club... whenever that is.