I'm blaming it on my dentist

I have been absent from my blog for a rainbow full of colorful reasons (ah, doesn't that sound lovely! I have no idea what it means, really, but it sounds just lovely) but the main legitimate reason is I was laid low by a dentist appointment. No, I haven't been at the dentist for... when was my last blog dated?...SIX days. You have to understand that it wasn't just the appointment itself. It was the entire drama of going to the dentist. A Dentist Phobia Monster Movie - directed by both Nora Ephron and Tim Burton. No. Really. It's action packed. There's Denial. Anxiety Attacks. Anger. Exhaustion. Pain. More exhaustion. Assorted drugs. The search for soft foods and someone willing to bring them to me so I don't have to get off the couch.

The appointment itself might actually be the weakest scene in the entire story.

I'm happy to announce the entire drama is now, as they say in the biz, "a wrap". Just a sore jaw and bit of residual ibuprofen popping left to remember it all by. Jeff and I are going to celebrate tomorrow with a day trip full of FUN and FOOD. Shopping. Bookstores. Coffee. Trader Joe's. Possibly quilt shops. I'll be back soon, possibly with photos of new scenery and indulgences.

And now I'm off to bed. I have to wake up early so I can fit in as many hours of fun and food as possible.

Oh, wait. P.S. My friend Deirdre e-mailed me this morning to tell me that Susanville was mentioned on The Letterman Show last night. Really? I missed it. So I Googled and found out that we've actually been mentioned not once, not twice, but three times! Each mention poking fun of our small town podunkedness. Hey, I cry foul but... uhm... I can't really find a lot of evidence to the contrary. It's not that there aren't some nice things about our small town, but culture and sophistication... not so much.

I've done a blog search for Susanville a few times in the past and there seems to be only two kinds of mention - those from people who don't live here but mention driving thru here. Sometimes the comments mention how out in the middle of nowhere we seem to be. There's no "seems to be" about it - we ARE out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes these comments mention how nice someone from our community was - to help tow them to the car repair shop, to give them directions. It is tru, we do have a lot of nice folks hereabouts.

The other kind of mention is from people who used to live here no longer do and 99% of the time they are commenting on how happy they are to have escaped, how exciting it is to now NOT live here. Well, I can kinda see this. It's not like this is Excitement Central. Most of these latter comments are from younger adults and if I was a younger adult, honestly, I'd probably be saying the same thing.

Anyhoo, the latest Letterman blip was about an article in the paper that asked people around town for ideas for a new community motto. Although I didn't see the show, I do rememberr reading the article in the local paper. Apparently we're officially changing it. Which, in my opinion, can't happen fast enough. Our motto now is "Land of the Never Sweats". I know, I know. It makes you want to jump in your car and race here to see what all that not sweating is about. The historians try to convince folks that it was meant as a compliment - that this land was so bountiful that folks here didn't have to work hard and were envied by the folks in other communities. Uhm, yeee-ah. First of all, this is not a land of bounty. Beauty, yes. Bounty, no. Most of us suspect that back in it's day, "Land of the Never Sweats" was probably not meant as a compliment.

P.P.S. Speaking of not sweating, I convinced Jeff to go for a walk with me along the bike path last week. It was unexpectedly warm and so I had to shed my scarf and hat, so as not to sweat. Nice hubby carried them for me, along with some goodies we bought along the way at the thrift store. We took these photos of each other and I thought they were rather nice, in a brown monotone pre-spring sort of way.