Teeth

A couple of weeks ago, the cap on my front tooth chipped. (Yes, I was using my teeth as a tool. Just to open a sugar packet, but still, bad idea.) Now, the history of that cap was not pleasant. The last time it was replaced, I was 21. The dentist took off the temporary cap to match the color, and the pain was excruciating. That was when I fainted, and woke to find the chair reclined far enough for my head to be lower than the rest of my body.

So today when my dentist told me that replacing the temporary cap with a permanent one was the easy part, no novocain needed, I was a trifle... shall we say, concerned. Much to my surprise, it was pretty easy. It took an hour and a half, but much of that time I was calmly reading while the lab was adjusting the tint on the new cap.

It looks great! Matches nicely, with no more dark line around the top. And I love my dentist!

Pedaling to Hawaii

Of all the trips into the wild that I find hard to imagine, setting out in a pedal-boat to cross an ocean has to be the at the top of the "Are you CRAZY?" list. And yet it's been done. Successfully. Both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The author of this book got the idea back in 1991 to circumnavigate the globe using only human power. He enlisted a friend, they scraped up funds and donations to have pedal boat Moksha custom-built, and left Greenwich in July of 1994. Biked to the coast, took the pedal boat across the channel, biked to Portugal, then headed out across the Atlantic. The Atlantic crossing took something like 110 days, October 1994 to February 1995. They used a hand-operated desalination device to get fresh water, and ate lots of freeze-dried food (but were lucky enough to come across a cable boat on Christmas day and have a turkey dinner).

They crossed the US separately on bikes and roller blades. After a long break for repairs, fund raising, and recovering from an accident with a car, they pedaled Moksha from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii in 54 days in the fall of 1998. After that, the author dropped out and his friend carried on alone from Hawaii to the Kiribati islands, then with other people by bike, kayak and pedal boat. The book was published in 2006, but according to the Expedition 360 website, the circumnavigation was finally completed in October 2007.

I find the whole idea just incredible. I would have said impossible, but obviously it wasn't. I can't begin to imagine what would drive a person to take on this kind of a task. It was quite an interesting read.

May Day 2009

Went to see Jason and Gaea in the May Day parade. It was a beautiful day, and I rode up on the light rail, then walked over to the parade route. As Jason told me, it wasn't hard to find them. It's easy to spot 15-foot long stilting pigs.

Gaea and her mom are in the pig in front, and Jason's job is to make sure they have space, since they can't see very well. Gaea controls the pig's tongue, too.


Here are the stilters at the end of the parade.

More photos here.

Afterwards, I walked all around Powderhorn Lake, and finally back to the light rail. So I got a bit of exercise...