hanging around the city

Today I went to the dentist, the final instalment on a long root canal/save at least a little bit of a dead tooth foray, it was fine. On the way out I walked through to Ridgway Place and noticed the above, which I suppose slightly intrigued me, I don't know why, I mean obviously people with names once ran businesses in streets like Ridgway Place and indeed still do. 

I bet that in the Melbourne of the mid-20th century a person working in footwear with the name Barfoot probably raised a lot of laughs. 

I looked him up in the newspapers and was interested to see that in 1947 he was at 29 Little Collins and then in 1967 he had moved around the corner but on the same block, to 22 Ridgway. The below ad is from 10 May 1967 (p. 36). I don't know I guess he lived there too? 

This actual house, the only one I think in Ridgway, is 20 and the place to its left is 22, obviously not the same building that was there in 1967, but it might have been similar. I wonder. 

In other news the building where my dentist is, the Coates Building, is in a bit of a state butand I also noticed this, which I like:

The PMG was rebranded Telecom in mid-1975, so this door has sat there with this designation on it for just over half a century now, apparently unchallenged. Kudos. 
 

implant

 

I had stage one of my implant this morning and it was less appalling than I thought it would be (so far). Turns out there is a zone between absolute dread and not even thinking about something at all, and it really helps you cope with the reality of the inevitable, that someone (a perfectly competent and skilled someone but someone nonetheless) is going to drill a hole in your jaw to stick a screw in it. The screw is then affixed with a cap and left for a couple of months and then the implant is screwed on top of it. That, at least, is how I understand it. Perhaps I am mixing up what I was told with the graphics in ads you get in the dodgiest part of the internet (that I go). They didn't give me a mud pack btw. 

So, having got through that, I am now watching Hidden Assets, an Irish-Belgian (I think) co-production about organised crime-terrorism-hiding assets and Taking. It. Easy. 

By the way, when I came back from the dentist Perry thought I smelt really interesting. I wonder if it was the chemicals or the blood. Both perhaps. But he was sympathetic. 

more teeth

So yesterday (Anzac Day) I became increasingly aware that I had something going on in my jaw. By late in the evening I had become convinced I had a crack in a molar and when I was presenting at a symposium this morning I told everyone there I would be regretfully leaving in the afternoon ie before it was all over, to go to a dentist and have it seen to. Well, I did go in the afternoon and I went to a dentist in Collins St where I was told that actually it wasn't a crack it was an infection and it was around a wisdom tooth that I should have extracted. I wasn't ready to do that there and then so I guess I have not really done much more than perpetuate the inevitable but I really will have to put a few days aside to get the tooth out I think and deal with Perry, work things etc. As I said to the dentist, there's never a good time but next week for instance is really a really bad time. But I suppose the week after probably would be too... 

I don't know what the cartoon above is signifying. I cannot imagine what that man has in that box (it doesn't help that there is obviously something written on it which was possibly not legible even in the original - which was much smaller than this). It's from the Sydney Sun 11 March 1945, p. 4 and perhaps it has something to do with rationing or... jeez I don't have the slightest clue what it could be about. But I am very very tired (slept about four hours last night) and... does it say capstans? Is he going to pay the dentist in cigarettes? But why the dentist particularly? Why is everyone else looking at him/the box? 

lost an old friend

The thing I had been dreading for months has finally come to pass, yesterday, when I had one of my front lower molars (OK I don't know the names of teeth, only that they each have a name or at least a number) removed in a one-hour exercise that didn't really hurt but which was stressful because I guess I had been prepped to imagine there was a possibility of things going wrong. Indeed I am not entirely sure yet that things haven't gone wrong because the tooth in question was somewhat infected and there might not be enough bone, or good enough bone, to put the implant in. I don't know. I am still to be honest not entirely sure I need an implant but I guess I have to bear in mind that if I don't have it my face might get weird(er) looking and while I wouldn't have to endure that, others would. 

Anyway at this point, I miss the tooth. I'd had it, I guess, 46 years or so and we had a good working relationship all that time. I had noticed it develop a fracture earlier this year (actually, I thought something was stuck in it but no, it was a crack) and it was unsalvageable, apparently. I guess it wasn't a thing with feelings, just a tooth in my mouth. Its absence is sorely felt though, and I'm not trying to be funny. 

Yesterday was a bit of a write-off then* but today I have spent quite a bit of time at the PROV scanning reports on Fishermans Bend so you can imagine I'm fairly chipper. This afternoovening I am going to write a thousand - you heard me, a thousand - words on a chapter intended to serve as a model for a joint-authored book. It's going to be about 8000 words ultimately (the chapter is), and it will be quite interesting but not panic-inducing or OTT. 

Image from Australian Woman's Weekly 2 July 1980 p. 109

*thank you to Laura for taking the day off to care for me. 

rain

 

So this morning I commented to Laura how annoyed I was (it doesn't take much) that it was going to be 24 degrees again today, mainly because yesterday I had told Perry (because of what the BOM had told me) that there would be no more 24 degree days for many months to come. 

I don't know if it will get to 24 today but it'll be a hat on a hat if it does because this morning as I was waiting for the bus it suddenly got extremely dark and good lord, what a downpour. As always photography does not stand up to competition from 1000 words (which unfortunately however I don't really feel that inclined to write) and of course I could have made the above entirely from AI but there are probably other ways to establish that it rained heavily this morning in Melbourne. It was a real drag. Particularly since the bus dropped me off at a stop half way between Cardigan and Lygon on Grattan, a hop skip and a jump from where I was going, but suddenly Lygon St itself was a rushing torrent, to the extent that I crossed it almost all the way and then turned back right at the gutter because it was so deep and wide it looked - if not dangerous, let's say, like I'd get my feet wet. 

On top of all this - I was going to the dentist. Buh-bow. Or, sad trombone. The news that I have a fractured molar which was going to have to be extracted at some point soon kind of puts the above into perspective. Still processing that. 

dragon, dentist, rain

I am not kidding I have been in situations in the last 3 days where each day I have heard commercial radio playing a classic 70s Dragon song - April Sun, Still in Love with You, Get that Jive if I remember rightly. Strange. I love Dragon as you may know.

I went to the dentist on Thursday am and had three fillings. It was entirely painless and barely uncomfortable, except for the itchiness. They put something on my face which got itchy underneath, and then later in probably unrelated news, when my face was still numb it got very itchy but I was unable to scratch it because it was numb.

It is raining I want to walk the dogs but I don't want to get wet. Aside from anything else I still have 5% of the cold I had a week ago.