Just a quick note to say...

...some political things. I'm a Democrat-- you may not be, and you may not agree with what I'm going to say here, but please have the courtesy to respect my opinions. You are fully entitled to yours. Also, I'm just going to post on a California proposition.

Please, please, please, if you are at all waffling, vote NO on Prop. 8. Please don't take away the rights for gays and lesbians to get married. If you have a problem with them getting married in a religious sense, then view it in a legal sense. How would you feel if your loved one was desperately ill in the hospital, and you weren't allowed to be by their side? Or vice versa? Can you imagine how you would feel if they died and you never got to say goodbye? Also-- legal marriage protects children. Whether or not you think gays and lesbians should have families or not, some of them do. And will continue to do so. Please don't punish their children by taking away legal protection from their parents.

America is supposed to be about the separation of church and state. Just as we must respect other people's religions, we should respect their civil rights. If we start taking away the rights of gays and lesbians, we are moving backwards from all the tremendous amount of work the women's suffrage movement and the African Americans did in getting the power to vote-- and to have interracial marriage.

Please, vote NO on proposition 8.

All I wanted for Christmas...

...was tooth number seven on the dental chart. And I finally got it! As some of my readers know, last October I was in a nasty bike accident that left me with a broken shoulder blade, collar bone, fractured bones in my face, stitches in my eyebrow, and a broken tooth. The bones have all healed completely, my eyebrow's grown to cover most of the scar, but the tooth remained broken, for the main reason that dental work, even with dental insurance, is really, really expensive. However, my mother kindly offered to fix my broken tooth for Christmas, and two days ago, I got a tooth!

My boyfriend found the whole process fascinating, and documented it. Dental technology has come a LONG way since when my dad was a dentist, almost twenty years ago now. The dentist took a three dimensional image of the space, fed it into the computer, sculpted the tooth on the computer, then a machine in the back milled my tooth to those specifications! See here:



This is after the dentist drilled down my broken tooth to a little nubbin. Believe me, I was terrified some catastrophe was going to happen and I would be stuck looking like this.


blocks of porcelain that the tooth is milled from.


The machine milling the tooth.


the same machine. A (slightly) better image.


adding colour.


the wee kiln that bakes the tooth. I wonder if miniature ceramicists use kilns like this?


All my teeth! I couldn't be more thrilled. I instantly felt better about myself, which made me feel very vain, but whatever. It's hard enough to have high self-esteem as a female without having a broken front tooth.