Wednesday, March 14, 2007

I am sceptical -- and in pain

Whirlpool just called. Apparently, my engineer has finished celebrating the birth of his third child and is returning to work. He will call at my house on Friday and fix my oven. I am not celebrating yet. Chances are he will discover something else wrong with the oven, or will have fathered another child with a different woman in a moment of super-fertility and won't turn up, or the weather will be nice and he will go to the beach. Any of those seem possible, if not plausible (particularly the last one). On the plus side, I no longer fear turning my mobile off, or indeed going to the loo without it. For the past two days, I have lived in a state of perpetual anxiety -- or more so than usual -- terrified that the phone would go off, I wouldn't be there, and I would miss my allotted 30-minute warning for the engineer's imminent arrival. So, a cautious "yay!"

The pain results from my foolhardy attempt to stave off the inevitable dental hygienist lecture by making up for 3 years of not flossing regularly last night. I cleaned, I flossed, I jabbed between my teeth with little wooden sticks, and flossed again. At the end of 30 minutes, my sink was full of blood and littered with dental detritus, and my jaw ached. And it continues to ache. I have taken 500 mg of paracetamol and will now add on 400 mg of ibuprofen in an attempt to overcome this. Work colleagues: please check on me throughout the afternoon to ensure that I haven't collapsed with liver failure.

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