The storms arrive – fail to disrupt play

You can always tell when it’s game day in Ottawa because the storm clouds inevitably come rolling in and you are left spending much of the day wondering whether or not some officious numpty will decide that it has rained too much to play on the City of Ottawa’s grass or perhaps whether the thunderstorm planned for the next province might invariably pose too much of a risk for footballers 500km away. So, it was not much surprise when I opened the curtains this morning and saw the grey clouds of doom hanging over the rooftops.

Hopefully the clouds will clear – but in the meantime, I had a day of appointments to contend with. First up was a 9 o’clock date with the dentist, albeit just for a “routine cleaning”. I have a love-hate relationship with my dental hygienist: I love to hate her. She is one of those people perfectly adapted to working in a dentist’s office. Passive-aggressive to the extreme, she can’t even sandblast my teeth without letting me know I’d be better off giving up the rest of my life to focus on the enamel.
“You’re brushing pretty well, but you could do better on the back of your front lower teeth. There is some staining there,” she invariably goes.
As she is the only person in the world who sees the back of my front lower teeth, she is entitled to her opinion. But I can’t help but wonder whether she might be better off focusing on her own performance as a hygienist, rather than shoving sharpened instruments into the gum and my cheek.

“You’ve got a bit of recession on lower right premolar,” she says. As if that means anything at all to me. “You’re not flossing properly between the bicuspids. The whole routine is an exercise in humiliation. It’s like being in fifth form chemistry again. You know you’ve done something wrong but the Bunsen burner wasn’t working properly and the test tube was cracked before you started. And you can’t say anything because the teacher – Mr. Davies, as I recall – is a right bastard who’ll give you a detention if you answer back, so you just have to stand there and shut up and take it. It’s the same with her. Only this time it’s not the threat of a detention holding me back, it’s her latex covered glove holding my jaw down and manipulating a sharp pointy periodontal probe close to my tonsils. If I was drinking at this moment in time, I’d have been straight down the pub for a quick livener.

Once she’d finished, grunting mildly to let me know she had been unable to find anything for the dentist to fix, it was the dentist’s turn to come in and have a prod. Thankfully, I like her. She did a root canal on me about 8 years ago and I didn’t feel a thing. She has small hands. I had no idea small hands would be a good thing for a dentist – unlike for my doctor, whose prostate exams would be vastly improved by his having less stubby fingers – but they make all the difference in the world. In the end, she told me I had a chipped tooth (“first molar,” she said, “you know, the one you crack your pistachio’s against”) and she’d better have me in to get it properly looked at. I shot a knowing look at the hygienist to tell her that if she’d been any good, she’d have seen that herself – and then ran out to the front desk to pay $300 for the privilege of having had the privilege of having my teeth cleaned.

Quick visit home – and then off to see my doctor. This was just a “meet and greet” (i.e., he wanted to see what I looked like before agreeing to take me on as a new patient), so I was on my best behaviour. Dr. Hassan is youngish and pleasant. That’s all I am going to say now. I had a glance at his hands as we said hello to each other, and his fingers looked reasonably slender. So, he’ll do for me until he decides the stress of working in Ontario is too much. I left after a five-minute chat, armed with a bloodwork requisition, a PSA requisition, and strict orders not to eat or drink before I went and peed into a cup.

Next it was off to buy a birthday card for my stepmother, and then home to recommence work on the municipal application of environmental assessment acts – phase II.

The afternoon passed quickly until the mother of all storms hit Ottawa. But by the time it came to leave for football, it had passed: the sun was out, the sky was blue, and Dorothy and Toto were out of view. Apart from the cow eating my back lawn, there was not a sign it had even happened.
Drove off to Orleans, stopping to pick up L, Ottawacker Jr.’s teammate, and Mitch, who wanted to see his godson play. The game, again at Rancourt Park, was a step in the right direction – but the boys lost again (2-1 this time). Not too downcast on the way home.