So who'd have thought that my trip to the dentist to get a cleaning would be the bright spot for Tuesday?

I was dreading the appointment, given that I've not had a cleaning since... well, I'm not sure, but I can pretty safely say it was before we started letting anyone in the Bush family be President. I know that tidbit will shock, amaze, and possibly nauseate you, but there it is.

Things didn't get any better when the hygenist started to explain the procedure for cleaning if there was too much stuff, a process that apparently involves a specialist, multiple appointments, jackhammers, and the medical application of Semtex. But as fate would have it, the governor called. Not only was I spared the invasive cleaning, it appears that my dental hygeine is good enough that the hygenist thought I flossed regularly, which I do, if by regularly you mean semi-annually.

Props to my parents and the staff of Manchester Memorial Elementary School for their making me a twice a day brusher.

I can't say I was thrilled with the scraping and the variety of metal instruments used in said scraping, and the end product of all the rinsing was not particularly what I wanted to see at 9 am, but I'll take it. The polishing was kind of gross, too, given the consistency of the paste and the way the gritty material lingered over the course of the day.

But there was still one more step to my visit - my first meeting with Dr. Ochoa, my dentist. Oddly enough, I worked with a guy with the last name of Ochoa at the Daily Free Press, and for a second I expected him to come around the corner (while he wasn't a dental student when I knew him - far from it, in fact - his career path seemed flexible enough that an entry into dental medicine wouldn't have surprised me).

In any event, Dr. Ochoa shows up (not the person I knew) and starts to go over my x-rays. He's pretty methodical about it, and I'm thinking that the boom is about to be lowered. With every added moment of scrutiny, I'm expecting an even greater list of exotic treatments whose financial implications will prevent my children from ever attending college - even if I'm still working at one.

He finally stops looking, and pronounced things OK. He did ask if I was interested in orthodontia, but the way I look at it is if I start moving my teeth around now I'd just be asking for trouble. So I pass.

Dr. Ochoa then takes an actual examination of my mouth, and that's when the actual trouble starts. I apparently have a number of pockets of "decay," though none of them are all that big. Most of them are on inside back surfaces, which I think relates back to my lack of flossing.

In any event, I'm going to have those taken care of at some point, though I'm going to have to build up some serious nerve to enter the arena with the whining and the drilling and everything. Of course, if I dally too long, Sarah will just make the appointments for me, so I figure I'll bite the bullet (so to speak) and take care of it as needed.