So then she drops a drill right on his face!

I paid a visit to my dentist yesterday, and they did something new and weird and different. Once my mouth was all numb and they were about to go in to start tooling around, the nice assistant lady broke out a pair of sunglasses and affixed them to my face in the usual sunglass position. "This is nice," I thought. "A little protection from the blinding rays of that 'Flight of the Navigator' light that they shine into your face." As they get to work on my teeth, the dentist starts telling the story behind the glasses. Turns out he had run into a dentist friend of his -- I was surprised that dentists are actually friends with other dentists, but there you have it -- and this dentist friend of his told him this hee-larious story about how his assistant had dropped an instrument right into a patient's face! Ow! Fuck! He didn't specify which tool, but they're all metal, and many of them have sharp points, so chances are it probably hurt like a sumbitch. So he's telling this story to both me and his assistant while they're working on my mouth, and he proceeds to tell us how he asked his friend, "well what'd you do to the employee?", and his friend tells him he didn't do anything to her because she was his wife. "What's he gonna do, fire her?" At this, my dentist laughs a hearty guffaw, his assistant sort of titters nervously, and laying there with my jaw open like Pac-Man on a binge, I can clearly see the message that he is conveying to her, perhaps even clearer than he does: I ain't put no ring on your finger lady, so if you fuck up, I'm free to send your ass packing. I felt just the slightest bit awkward being an unwitting third party to his unconscious passive aggression.

I picked up the boys and still managed to beat The Ash home. When I saw her car in the driveway, I walked out with Simon to meet her. She was carrying a single plastic bag, out of which she triumphantly pulled a 24 ounce can of Budweiser, A.K.A. a tallboy. The explanation? Cheap American beer kills slugs, and slugs seem to be having their way with some of the plants in her garden. But it doesn't take 24 ounces of fine American lager (that's what it says on the can, it must be true) to kill a few slugs, so guess who washed down the rest of it? I immediately felt like I was tubing down the Guadalupe River in the summer time. It was like a gross-tasting Calgon moment.