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I just got back from the best dentist appointment. (never thought I’d say THAT!)

My new hygienist, Bianca at Dentists of El Cerrito, was great.
First, she was nice.
She did a cleaning and…. it… didn’t… hurt! What????
I noticed that the ultrasonic tool she used sounded different… a bit quieter than I’ve heard/felt in the past. I asked her after the treatment and she talked about how some people turn the machine up or down and press harder or less. Well, whatever she did, I’m happy!

There were a few moments of zinging nerve pain, about a “6” on the pain-o-meter, but other than that, the pain level was all 1-3 on a scale from 1-10!

Of course, I popped 3 ibuprofen before the appointment, as normal. (call it a pro-tip?)

But the best part was that she said, “You don’t have to come back in 4 months. I want to see you in 6 months.” What?! It’s a good teeth day!

My brushing regimen:

• Brushing about 10 times a week
• Flossing about 5 times a week (I use a floss holder and almost never change the floss, I just wipe it on my tongue)
• Water pik about 5 times a week (set to 9 out of 10. Watching the food gunk fall out of my mouth is so revealing)
• High fluoride toothpaste about 2 times a week (my dentist said “why do you want that?” I said “’cause it can’t hurt”

My last hygienist, Sheena, was good too. But this visit was the most painless eva’. Before that, I went to a dentist where the hygenist used a different power tool and a lot more manual scraping and it hurt A LOT. I’d track the pain as a constant 5-6 with a few spectacular 7’s and 8’s. After I asked a bit, they gave me a lidocaine gel. That helped, bringing the pain down to 3’s and 4’s. They also tried giving me Cyclorinse but that didn’t help the pain at all.

I’ve got some gingival pockets from not flossing until I was about 30 years old. So I’ve been kind of obsessed with having not-that-bad teeth.

Tonight Megan and I had a really fun game night!
While Abigail played Minecraft all night, building fantastic worlds, we played Rummy 500 and Scrabble!

Yesterday we worked on the most enjoyable cluster puzzle with 300 Kawaii Creatures. The most fun was us having to identify the creatures to one another across the table, “I’m looking for a yellow teddy-bat about to hug.” “Oo! Here it is! heheh!”

And the other day, the three of us had rousing games of Sleeping Queens and Hive!

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I just called the service desk at my local Honda dealership to schedule regular service on my car. I got an AI attendant from start to finish. It freaked me out.

It got the job done but every bit of the call screamed “The robots in the uncanny valley are coming to kill you!!”

It had fake call-center noise in the background, “she” was unfathomably cheery, and she got things wrong in the same way that descriptions of products on Amazon are wrong but right.

I didn’t like it.

I welcome you call call Skynet Honda Service Desk at 510-804-2348

Calvin Trampleasure was a teacher in the local school district and at Madera Elementary School for a very long time. He passed away in 2022 from cancer. I never met him but gained something by reading his autobiographical blog here

A mural was painted in his honor on the upper yard at Madera.

TL;DR: Carwiser.com is a good place to sell your used car.

My birth mother passed away a few months ago. I went to Texas for her celebration of life and to help my birth-aunts close out the house. We also had to sell my birth-mother’s car. I had read in Consumer Reports that Carwiser.com was well recommended for selling a car easily so I gave it a try. I spent 15 minutes typing in all the specs of the car, including all the visible damage etc. And then [beep boop beep] it spit out an offer saying Carmax just 20 minutes away would give us a great price. I had looked on KBB.org and and a couple other sites and Carmax was offering $1,000 higher  than that…. unseen! So I clicked the “yes, please” button. A few days later, aunt Christine brought the car to Carmax and even though there was a technical snafu (they hadn’t gotten the photos that I had uploaded Carwiser), they totally honored the price and it all went remarkably smoothly.

It might have been fun if I knew how to play.

It was fun picking out dreadnaughts with Heather, less fun being told that I didn’t know how to play.

TL;DR: I’m going to try switching from Notion and Dynalist to Obsidian to manage my life notes.

Over the past few years I’ve been looking for the best way to take and keep notes related to life.

I’ve tried a bunch of tools but not been happy yet. It’s essential to not try too hard at this task because the tool is just… a tool. But it’s also important to keep thinking and looking and doing. My good friend PPG correctly reminds me that no tool will ever be perfect, or heck, even “very good”. But trying helps.

Here is what things look like right now. My tasks are:

• Passwords and similar – kept in a searchable pile of Google Docs
• Events – personal, family, work – kept in Google Calendar – this is for concretely timed events like “going to dinner tomorrow at 6pm
• Todo items – with due dates/deadlines – kept in a Notion Timeline – this is for todo items I need to start working on particular date

• Quick Notes – kept in Dynalist – My goto “Gotta write this down quickly!”
• Static Informational Documents – in Google Docs, on my computer, on little scraps of paper in piles on the floor of my office

I’m only moderately happy with the Notion Todo list because while the Notion interface is pretty (a plus!) , it’s terrible with writing large, formatted documents, like instructions, or documentation. And the timeline tool has an effective granularity of 1 day, no more and no less, which isn’t excellent. Google Docs is a good place for documentation but there’s no way to make Google Docs have the timeliness of for example, saying “Hey, don’t forget to work on that project today!”

I tried using the paid Dynalist app to keep everything together because for $5/month Dynalist integrates with Google Calendar. But Dynalist isn’t a great place to write long documents either.

So today I’m trying Obsidian.

What I want is a tool that can be:

• Timely – “Don’t forget to work on that project today”)
• Holds well formatted documents – (“Here’s your password info. Here’s all the notes on your project. Here’s the timeline of that long-running project.”)
• Calendar-ish – (“Ding ding! It’s time to pick the kid up from tennis lessons! It’s time to leave for your work appointment!”)
• Quick Note Capable – (“Here’s the shopping list, sorted by location in Trader Joe’s. Here’s the name of that guy you met last week.”)
• Searchable – (“How do I get back to that project?”)
• And the magic part: Integrate all of the above – (“Ding ding! It’s time to work on that project again! Here’s the running notes from last session and the documentation you’ve built up!”

I’ve been oogling Obsidian for a year, which consists mostly of me being on the Obsidian subreddit, and occasionally googling about it. Let’s hope this is a USEFUL, LOW-PAIN attempt.

Last night I got excited because the Obsidian Outliner Plugin look a lot like Dynalist. I know it’s something like “pretty good” at writing documentation, and I think it can now do calendarly things. I got giddy thinking that Obsidian might be able to do ALL THE THINGS. Fingers are crossed!

I’m not saying Trump is a pedophile or whoremonger. Instead, I’m noting this recently released email between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015 where Epstein writes “…[victim] spent hours at my house with [Trump]”. The email clearly appears to be part of a discussion where Ghislaine and Epstein are contemplating blackmailing Trump about his interaction with said unnamed victim.

What the fuck was Donald Trump doing spending “several hours” at Jeffrey Epstein’s house with an underage prostitute (ie. sex traffic victim) under the watchful eye of said prostitute’s pimp? Was he teaching her the art of the deal? Was he helping with her algebra homework?

See this and 2 more similarly odious messages presented here https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5605582/epstein-files-release-trump-email-grijalva-massie

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I remember when they first introduced this notion that you shouldn’t give babies peanuts “just in case” and I thought that was a bad idea and would probably cause allergies. Welp. That’s what witholding peanuts from babies does! I’m sure it’s true for many other things. Every kid should eat their share of dirt, peanuts, all the other potentially allergenic foods, and build a tolerance to iocane powder!

Reversing peanut advice prevented tens of thousands of allergy cases, researchers say