The old person's diet and a bit of a stretch

Ah, I have a confession to make today - I haven't been blogging about it as it's really rather dull, but I've been suffering from a rather painful right jaw for the last few days - the result of an unconscious teeth-grinding session on Monday night/Tuesday morning, I fear (yes, well , best not to think of it, really ...). Unfortunately today it was so bad that I could barely eat (it's tricky when you can't chew, my dears ...) so I managed to grab a dentist's appointment this morning just to check it wasn't something else.

Well, the good news is it's not an abscess - hurrah! But the bad news is there's really nothing particular that can be done at this stage, so the dentist advised eating food that doesn't need chewing over the next few days until it settles down (hopefully soon, as I'm not good with pain!) and taking Nurofen to keep the worst of it at bay. She also suggested that at my next appointment in December, I should get fitted for a night guard, which you wear while sleeping to stop the grinding. As it were. Looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet (sorry!) and resign myself to having absolutely no glamour at all during the hours of darkness. Hmm, no change there then. There's not really a great deal of glamour during the hours of daylight either, but there you go. The dentist did say she can do it sooner if the pain continues or I waste away to nothing due to lack of solid food - but let's hope it doesn't come to that and I still have four months of naked-mouth sleep time left. Ah well.

On the way back home - no golf due to the rain, alas - I popped into Godalming, and the pharmacist in Boots also suggested putting a hot water bottle on the jaw to ease the pain, so I've tried that once today and it's quite helpful. I might try it later too - as I don't really want to be reduced to simply licking the topping off my statutory pizza tonight, though I might reluctantly give the garlic bread a miss. Sob! Apart from that, I suspect a few days of soup and ice cream and yoghurt beckon ...

Anyway, here's today's meditation:

Meditation 193

War stretches on,
filling the future

with blood, death,
pain. Warm yourself

by the fire,
wait for the questions

you cannot answer,
the grief you cannot name.


Meanwhile, I'm stumbling on with that ever-increasing short story. I've got one more mini-scene to do now, plus the ending plus the sex scene. Really, the more I write it, the longer it gets (again, as it were). Perhaps it really wants to be a novel after all? If so, it will have to wait its turn, the pesky beast - I've got other things I'd like to concentrate on first, believe me. This afternoon, I've also had my Alexander Technique lesson and am now learning how to be wider. Honestly, I swear Linda had my shoulder blades where they've never been before, at least not without a passport and a suitcase. Soon I'll have to go through doors sideways.

And tonight, there's the cleaning. Serious cleaning as I fear the Domestic Police would certainly judge us wanting this week. Plus there's an episode of QI on later, I think, so that'll be our reward for being good, hurrah.

Today's nice things:

1. Managing an instant dentist appointment
2. Nice pharmacists
3. Poetry
4. Short stories, with minds of their own
5. Alexander Technique
6. TV.

Anne Brooke - definitely not biting off more than she can chew
Vulpes Libris - finding out what really happens at the Romantic Novelists' Conference ...