nothing like waking up early riding in the fog for a dentist appointment. doctor huang has his practice in the same building as an english school that sees non-stop traffic of international kids coming in and out. he was the only one in the office. he didn't see me right away, which gave me a few minutes to catch my breath and stop sweating.

it's been 2 years since i last saw doctor huang. he looked the same, maybe more whites in his close cropped haircut. i told him my parents were currently on vacation in taiwan, he said he just came back himself after a 3 week trip visiting his 97-year old mother in kaohsiung.

he examined the implanted crown, tapping it from multiple directions to see if it was loose. from his examination it seemed the molar was pretty solid. i told him to wiggle it back and forth, and that's when he saw what i was talking about. he said the problem was just a loose crown and not a rejected implant. he said sometimes the screw isn't tightened down enough and could come loose over time. the fix was simple, just drill into the crown to access the screw top, tighten it back down, and then patch up the hole.

the crown turned out to be extremely hard and took a long time to drill through. whenever doctor huang wasn't looking, i'd feel the hole in my molar with my tongue, which was surprisingly larger than i'd imagined, like a crater. i wasn't worried, i left it in my dentist's capable hands, figured he knew what he was doing.

after he drilled the crown to reach the screw, he used a tool to release the screw and removed the crown. it was weird suddenly not having a tooth. he polished the crown and inspected the neighboring teeth. he thought was looked to be a cavity, gave it a scrape, but took an x-ray just to be sure. the x-ray revealed that the titanium implant itself is perfectly fine, no danger of it ever falling out with it's aggressive thread design.

put the crown back in was much easier than taking it out. he pop it in, used a tool to screw it down tightly, then patched up the hole with some kind of enamel material that cured via UV light. he also said i needed a cleaning but did a quick pass through all my teeth with a scrubbing pick. when i went to go pay, he said it wasn't necessary, on the house. that was very generous of him for an hour of his time, he i've been going to doctor huang since the late 80's, back when he had an office at fresh pond, so we're practically family.

while i was riding back home to cambridge, the newly installed molar felt weird. it felt like it was misaligned, that it was set too tightly to one of my other tooth. or maybe my mouth was still getting used to the newly set tooth, that i could detect even a small difference, but over time i'd get used to it and not notice it anymore. still, i kept playing with the tooth with my tongue the entire trip home.

i made it home by 10:30am, but left an hour later, in the direction of belmont to bring in all those garden refuse bins, stopping by the cafe along the way. i brought in the trash cans there and brought hailey to belmont with me because my sister wasn't home.

in belmont i waited; garden refuse pickup is the last pickup and typically they don't come until the late afternoon. by 2pm the foggy day turned into a dark and rainy day. there was even the potential for thunderstorms but it never came. prior to that hailey and i were outside in the backyard chasing after squirrels. while i called her back inside so she could sleep, i was researching on how to get rid of the verizon FIOS gateway router and replace it with my own. i also set up the 2nd webcam so it was pointing to the front of the house. i ate a pastry i brought with my from my house for a late lunch.

my sister was supposed to come to belmont to pick up her dog, but she called me at 3:30pm asking if could bring hailey back. garden refuse pickup still hadn't come, but my sister said she'd come back to the house tomorrow to bring in the bins. so i called hailey and took her back to my sister's place before i returned home by 4pm.

i ate the last of my tonkatsu for dinner. i made such a large plate of vegetables and rice, i had to use a separate plate just to hold the tonkatsu. besides shredded cabbage and picked radish, i also chopped up some sweet mini peppers. by then my fixed crown was no longer bothering me. maybe it took some time for it to set properly, for it to feel like my tooth again.

today was the midterm elections. by 8pm i was parked in front of the television, watching the results. democrats won the house, but republicans retained control of the senate. many star democrats lost their election: beto o'rourke in the texas senate race (lost to ted cruz), and andrew gillum lost in the florida governor race. republican control of the senate means donald trump will be safe from an impeachment, but it depends on the findings of the mueller investigation, which will gain protect with democrat control of the house. one wild card is mitt romney as the junior utah senator: as a moderate republican, hopefully he can be the voice of reason should the senate need to vote on key issues.