Monthly Archives: February 2004

Today we felt the effects of spring break.  It felt like everyone was trying to get their dental check-ups done for the year.  We saw whole families of kids.  That can be either fun or total disaster.  Today was fun – mostly.  Just about all of the little(under 4 yr olds) kids were super good.  And the fun part comes from getting to see the whole family interacting.  Most of the time when the whole family comes in at once – Mom and Dad and the kids – everyone is well behaved.  There is something to be said for being part of a functioning family! 

So, some things were functioning well at the office.  Some things were not.  One of our younger patients needed to use our toilet facilities, tried to close the door and the whole handle came off in his hands!  This necessitated an emergency call to the local lock repair shop.  They weren’t going to be able to come till the afternoon, so a call went out to my handy son.  He and Kieran came to our rescue.  Kieran did his magic and had all of us in smiles in no time.  Then amazingly, the lock guy also showed up.  He put on a temporary handle while a new one of the lever arm type is ordered and we were back in buisness!

We also had a high school student spend the day at the office.  She is interested in Dentistry as a profession.  So she just hung around with us all day.  It was not a very exciting day as far as treatment since we did so many check-ups and that is not too exciting to watch.  But we got to talk a bit about what to expect andwhat kind of skills are important to have.  I think one needs to like people and have some ability artistically.  You also need to have patience with performing detailed tasks.

We also had a dental student drop in this afternoon with some papers to sign.  We usually have a final year student come and work in the office during the summer.  It helps us keep the office open during the summer and gives them some valuable experience.  It also gives Roger, my partner, another male for support.  He puts up with being the only male the rest of the year.  And having a young and rather good looking male student in  the office seems to provoke some interesting reactions from some of the female staff – all of whom are fairly attached to their own men.  Me – well lets just say that he’s about the age of my kids.  I think too much like a mother!

Just another day at the office!

My winter excursion was great.  At first I wondered what I had gotten myself into as I had to keep stoking the fire and leave the door of the fireplace open to get the maximum effect of the heat into the one room of the old log cabin.  I wasn’t sure my wood supply would last.  Then as the log walls warmed up, the temperature in the room kept getting warmer too.  I did wake up a few times in the night to replenish the fire but by morning it was hot in the old shack!  And then today, it was easy to keep the temperature at a comfortable even level.  The log walls seem to retain the heat nicely once they get warm.

Reading by lamplight and candles is great – before long your eyes are heavy and you might as well go to bed.  So that is just what I did.  And when you are all alone in a log cabin in the winter and you need to keep as warm as possible – only the outer layer of clothing – the jacket, boots and mitts come off. 

I had put a basin of snow on the stove to thaw for washing up before going to bed.  By the middle of the night the stove was hot, the water was hot and the inside of the cabin was more like a sweat lodge than the cold cabin I had gone to sleep in.

Today there was lots of time for reading.  I finished a book on prayer that I have been working through.  And there was uninterupted time for talking to God – good time.  Also did some knitting – a good cold weather occupation.  And then this afternoon I took off into the forest on my snowshoes.  Snowshoeing is fairly strenuous work for someone as out of shape as I am, even with the new type of snowshoes.  I wonder how sore I will be tomorrow.

I’ve posted some pictures over in my photo gallery.  Have a look.

I must say my family is so good to let me go off like this by myself.  Or maybe they are glad to be rid of me for a day!!  The house was even clean when I came home – sort of anyway!  And Patrick came home for spring break so he’ll be around for the week.  It is good to see him again and have him home.

Today was much colder than I remember it being promised.  In spite of the -30 C this morning, I picked up my dad and stepmother and we headed out to the farm. 

A few years ago, my dad decided to sell the family farm where he had lived as boy.  This is where my great-grandparents homesteaded.  Just 2 quarter sections are all that were left to my dad.  My uncle and aunt had sold their part much earlier.  I never lived on the farm.  Dad was a pastor and so we lived everywhere but there.  But my mom and dad decided to move back to the farm and built a beautiful home there.  I was married and beginning to raise a family of my own by then and had just headed off for the Congo.  Mom and Dad moved into their home in the fall.  Mom dropped dead in her garden in the spring of the year.  Things at the new house kind of came to a standstill, from what I heard.  I didn’t get to see the new home until our first furlough and by that time, Dad had remarried and things had gotten back to a fairly normal pace, with horses, dogs and cattle and the land for grain farming rented out.

Then one year, Dad was loading some cattle into a chute and one of them took a dislike to it, breaking Dad’s collar bone fairly badly.  Other health issues seemed to follow and they decided that since they had a prospective buyer, it was time to leave the farm and move to town.  But they didn’t leave entirely.  They rent a very small part of the old homestead back and on it is the old log cabin that one of my ancestors built and lived in for awhile. 

It is just a tiny place – about 9 feet square.  There is room for a small table with a couple of chairs, a bed and a wood burning stove.  That is about it.  Today it was surrounded by four foot high snow drifts packed hard by the wind – except for six feet in front of the door where the porch gives protection and the ground is completely bare of snow.  We took out a few things and made sure that I would be able to get to the cabin on my own.  My snowshoes actually make it quite easy. 

Tomorrow I’m going out to my own little hermitage for a day.  There will be no electicity, no indoor facilities or water.  Just me, my wood stove, candles and a lamp – and God.  I’ve asked him to come.  And I will take the camera so all of you can see this special spot when I get back.

And the weather is supposed to be warmer but you never know.  If you don’t hear from me again, I may have frozen to death.  But I doubt that – I do have a cell phone.

As I was lying in one of the dental chairs at my office – yeah, looking up at the ceiling from the perspective of a patient – I was contemplating the fact that as I get older, my body is starting to let me know in more painful ways that I am not immortal.  Not that I ever thought I was, physically at least, but I have sort of taken the relatively normal, painless, functioning of my body for granted.  So it is easy to let good health practices slide.  I eat things that are too high in fat or too high in carbohydrates.  And yes, sometimes, I forget to brush and floss.  I eat sticky black licorice that pulls off a crown – and post – and part of the poor old tooth. And I end up in a supine position with my mouth open suffering the consequences of fear and neglect from long ago when I accumulated a lot of big fillings.

I was also thinking of other parts of me that I now take pains not to damage.  Steve, our youth pastor, is beginning to know about these things too.  Welcome to the world of the walking toboggan wounded!   I had a tobogganing accident back in 1995, crushing a vertebra.  So I gave up tobogganing.  I also fell x-country skiing and injured my wrist so I gave that up for the most part.  At that time I found out that life and disability insurance companies don’t much like you if you have these little incidents.  And that was when I needed the insurance the most, just starting up my own business.  So now I stick to snowshoeing.  

But as I was in my contemplative mood – being forced to lie still with my mouth open for a couple of hours I also realized that I am a whole lot less concerned about my physical self now than I was a few years ago.  I’m going to a place where there is perfect healing for this tired old body so in some ways I am less attached to it, less inclined to worry about it.  (Don’t worry, I’m not being morbid or purposefully neglecting myself.)  And, since I figure that everyone’s teeth should be great up there in heaven, I am looking forward to long times of just sitting in His presence, worshipping and sort of soaking up the Son.

It’s done, it’s ready, voila!!

Thanks to Randall, I am going colorful. 

The banner comes from a picture of one of our wonderful early winter skies. 
    

Work was done and the sky was just changing as I drove home.  Ran in, got the camera and recorded some of the beauty God created.  The colours were incredible.  This is winter but not dark and dreary or sad.

So when I wanted to come up with a new look to my site, this was my first thought.  And Randall has taken it and from it pulled out background and font colours to tie it all together. 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Wednesdays can be long days. 

Gate Crashers prayer starts out the morning at 6:30 and of course I have to be up about an hour before so I am ready for work.  But it is such a good way to start my day that I can’t imagine starting Wednesday without it.

Then every other week I start off my work day by sedating and working on little kids.  Most of these kids are under three.  All are in need of serious dental work.  About half of what I do are extractions.  And, although the kids are sedated, they can still make a lot of noise.  One of the things that I have found is that as the sedation is wearing off, some of the kids get very irritable and angry.  By that time their mouths are numb, they have had some dental work so are either drooling or bleeding, they have no idea what is going on since the meds cause amnesia, all they know is that they are in a place they don’t want to be.  I am done my part and the poor parent picks up where I have finished – one woosy angry kid.  It is nice to be able to send them home at that point.  But often they have to wait for their taxi.  Today we had a screamer in the office for about an hour after he was done.  My front office staff were glad when he finally left the waiting room.

The cold and flu like illness is also travelling through the office.  It was hard to be without one of my assistants today, and my other assistant was worried about her son who sustained a concussion in his hockey game on the weekend.  He was home alone, throwing up.  I managed to send her home a bit early at noon so she could check on him.  But tomorrow looks like she will have to carry on alone again.  And we are going to be very busy tomorrow.

Now it is late and I need to get some sleep.  Tomorrow is another day. And I get to do the single parent thing again for a few days.

Today’s weather was weird and not nice weird.  Woke up to -3 C.  About an hour later the radio was talking +1 C.  Then it started to snow and blow and tonight it is to go down to -23 C.  I look across the river from my home and this is what I see.  I can only imagine how bad it must be out on the roads, especially farther south where they are not surrounded by trees to break the wind.  Needless to say, a lot of my out of town patients called in unable to come because of the weather.

Because of cancellations at the office giving me an extra free hour just before noon, I came home for lunch.  Up pulled a car – my daughter and friends decided to see what they could scrounge up for lunch at my house.  Today was early dismissal from school.  I had a funny feeling that my daughter might decide to skip this afternoon’s classes as I headed back to work.  Sure enough.  She called later and wondered what to make for supper.

“So”, I said, “Did you go back to school this afternoon?” 
“Well, no, not exactly”  she told me. 

Honest at least.  Although I’m not sure just how “not exactly” works as a modifier to “no”.

She still hasn’t figured out how mothers know, just know, some things. 

So a lot of little chores are going to get done around our house – starting with the cat litter.

Jordon linked to an article on the sermon. 

No one likes to be preached to.  But to have someone reveal to me what God is saying to them, especially when I see them modeling the sort of Christian life that I can see and relate to – that teaches me.  That makes me want to follow them as they lead on down the path to knowing God more fully.  And the parts of the service that don’t go perfectly – and then God visits anyway – well that just is an encouragement that I can do some things too, because I know that if I do anything it is not likely to be perfect.

So maybe church should be more like a jamm session.  Having a really good musician leading us into the music, encouraging us to try playing and helping us to improve as we go.  That would be fun and challenging – and it is.