this past weekend:

• cameron and i threw our housewarming party on friday. it was pirate themed. lesson learned: when you have two functioning eyes, an eyepatch is not a good idea. i couldn’t find my mouth with my glass and that meant the eyepatch had to go.
• meghan, her brother ryan and i saw ‘hellboy II’ at the chinese theatre on saturday. chinese theatre: awesome as usual. ‘hellboy II’: visually astounding, screenplay-challenged.
• sunday morning i got up early (really early – like…5:30) and drove to playa del rey for the 15th annual keep LA running event. clayton’s sister, sue, has been in town and she’s a runner, so she entered the 10k. maria and i walked the 5k. everyone made good time and it was a great morning to be out. plus, i got a lot of free food and drinks at the expo afterwards. i was so inspired, that i decided to enter the bix for the second year in a row. i haven’t been training though, so no way i’ll beat my time from last year.
• after the 5/10k, we went to the santa monica beach. and i was dumb and didn’t put on sunscreen. i even thought it several times, but did not act. it was extremely stupid and i’ve been paying for it ever since with a terrible sunburn that covers my whole body except my face, bathing suit area, hands and feet. i’m finally not burny anymore, or as red, but in about a week i’ll be peeling everywhere. gross.
• after the beach, we went to this fantastic restaurant and got wraps and sweet potato fries. unfortunately i can’t remember the name.

tomorrow i leave for a weekend in chicago and then a week in the quad cities. internet access will be scarce, but i’ll be sure to take a lot of photos.

it all started innocently enough. hey we should replace this crown right away. ok let’s do this other little filling while we’re at it. whoops your mouth is too small to fit our ginormo nasa probe camera thing all the way in the back. ok let’s do impressions – it’ll take longer but you’ll still be out of here in an hour. whoops that crown came out wrong we have to do it again. hmm still doesn’t fit. guess we need to take new impressions. wait another hour.

in all i spent five hours on my back with my mouth stretched open and no less than three hands inside. most of the time i was stared at the ceiling and contemplated the odd placement of the fire sprinkler. for the last hour or two i finally understood the detached desperate claustrophobia that must be felt by alien abduction victims or, less dramatically, the majority of people when at the dentist.

now my jaw is killing me, i have a headache and i feel guilty for missing work this morning, even though it wasn’t really my fault that my promised hour and a half, tops, turned into being held hostage for five. i feel like i should do something nice for myself now as a reward for being a good patient, but i can’t think of anything that doesn’t involve money in some form or another and i just spent all of mine on my teeth.

update: you can get me this adorable limited edition polar bear print if you’d like to lift my spirits.

update 2: my jaw-holder-opener muscles are so tired i can no longer open my mouth wide enough to insert food, at least not without a concerted effort. this is going to be a problem. i guess i’m puréeing that thai food for dinner?

* i will say though, that the dentist herself was fantastic and empire dental is definitely the most high-tech office i’ve ever patronized. the visit took so long because the dentist didn’t want to leave me with sub-par work, which i appreciate.

i went to the dodgers – cubs game today with meghan, josh and evan for evan’s birthday. it was a great day for a ball game, although the sun was brutal. there was much re-applying of sunscreen. the game was going great until the dodgers hit those two home runs and the cubs started making all of those errors – sigh. meghan’s cubs curse continues! meghan goes to a cubs game, and generally they lose. the universe has a cruel sense of humor.

other random events of the day: the gordon biersch stand ran out of brats and italian sausages by the 2nd inning; some dude shouted to meghan in solidarity re: her cubs fishing hat (a credit card promotion incentive); evan was listening to the belmont stakes coverage on his xm radio and jeez – is 17 hours of coverage really necessary for a two minute race?

tomorrow: the beach! hopefully the tide won’t be too high to check out the tidepools.

i managed to sunburn half of my stomach and one long strip down the back of my leg. but still, there are worse ways to spend a holiday then falling asleep on the beach, reading comics and eating scallops.