Poppy the Pokemon

Remember the heights of energy and accomplishment I reached over Thanksgiving break? No?

Well, anyway, yesterday was quite the comedown. (Henh henh ... she said 'come.'")

In fact, you might say that I reverted to total slugdom.

Of course, I have an excuse, people. I had a dentist appointment first thing in the morning, and while I was there, I received three massive shots of novocaine. This deadened all the feeling in my tongue, jaw, and face, and made my lips and tongue swell up, but didn't do all that much to numb the teeth in question.

You Monty Python fans will remember the scene in Holy Grail where they're bringing out their dead and Eric Idle says "I'm not dead yet" and finally John Cleese whacks him over the head. Well, yesterday was like a remake, with my teeth playing the Eric Idle role and Dr. Sadist filling in for John Cleese.

Except it didn't work. The teeth wouldn't die. These were some stubborn nerve endings, people.

Naturally, this really sucked. The easiest way to deal with the torments of extended and insanely expensive dental work is to not feel it going on. At all. As in "This afternoon Poppy's head is being played by a cinder block." As in "You won't feel a thing ... until you get the bill."

But this time I ended up not only feeling certain unpleasant aspects of the work in progress, but also biting my own ginormous tongue while trying--at Dr. Sadist's request--to ascertain whether my jaws were meeting properly when the new, ultra-deluxe and horribly expensive crowns were in place. So then I had to come home and wait for all that novocaine to wear off, wearing, as an extra-kewl fashion statement, a shiny triangular tongue-biting-preventing doohickey.

Hence the illustration of Lickitung, one of the lesser-known Pokemon. This is pretty much what I felt like by the time I got home from John Cleese's I mean Dr. Sadist's office.

So ... what did I do to fill the empty hours while talking, eating, and drinking were pretty much out of the question? Why, shop for Christmas presents, of course!

But because I was an invalid, this year's Christmas shopping involved even less physical effort than usual. And that is saying a lot, as for years I have been the Uncrowned Queen of Internet Shopping.

This is what I did:

1. Grabbed a stack of likely-looking catalogs.
2. Got a pad of Post-It notes.
3. Started paging through catalogs, and when I found something promising, stuck a Post-It note to to the page in question.

Today, my mouth is operational again, so I will start making the calls to order the stuff. (Naturally I've thought about ordering this stuff on-line, but--and I know this will sound heretical--I find that finding it the stuff via a hard copy catalog is faster and easier. It takes less time to flip through a 40 page catalog than to hit different web sites, wait for pages to load, and squint at a tiny picture of the item in question. Also, ordering from a human being can be helpful. Even pleasant. Call me a Luddite, but there you are.)

I expect to be about 80 percent done with my shopping by 9:00 this evening.

Smugly,

--P.

p.s. Anyone who wants to say anything snarky about catalog shopping can just bite his or her tongue. Get it??