Today’s definitely an improvement–moderate periods of no-pain punctuated by brief, jarring periods of intense agony, which, while not all that fun, sure beats the hell out of prolonged periods of agony punctuated by occasional respite. Starts to get pretty painful as the ibufrofen wears off. I’ve tried my father’s home remedy–tobacco on the gums–which is surprisingly effective, but makes my mouth taste like an ashtray (and picking out the bits of tobacco afterwards is a pain) so I’m only doing it when all else fails.

But y’all are probably tired of hearing about my pains, so on to other topics!

It was a good trip. My mother’s preparing frantically for an upcoming show and spent most of it painting her current favorite topic, sheep. They’re very cool sheep, but naturally the Montana jokes were flying. Hung out, did some antique shopping, bought a snazzy cedar chest dated 1921–we’d been looking for a chest to guard our feet from the depredations of certain small fuzzy animals who think that playing Catch-the-Toes is the height of fun, and this one looked pretty cool. And I’m a sucker for cedar. Got what may well be the best haircut of my life. Tom, probably as a result of being a sculptor, gives really good haircuts. Redyed it red for the first time in a coupla years, since…err…why not? Spent awhile staring vaguely at my mother’s Black Series, a bunch of paintings of roots and twigs and stumps. I have no good photos–their webpage has only very small images that don’t remotely express the coolness in person–but you can get lost in the things. Made me want to paint sticks and roots.

And then we came home, and you know the rest, with the pain and the screaming and the ow-ow-ow-it-hurts and so on.