Of Christmas and Teeth

This temporary filling is weirding me out. It's kind of made of foam or something and I keep messing with it. rawr. I'll be glad when the real one is in after the 25th.

We had a party on Sunday night. Alex played Santa; a bunch of ALTs and Japanese people came. Toshiko gave us a ride (thank you Toshiko!) and it was a ton of fun. Alex made deviled (angeled?) eggs and I made pizza bread, my new favorite pizza-type recipe since pizza dip.

...I should make pizza dip.

Drooling aside.

I got the cutest Snoopy mug!! It comes with a little matching teaspoon! I almost wanted to send it home to Mom but I LOVE IT SO MUCH. MINE. Maybe I'll give it to her when I come home. :)

Our Christmas presents are going to be kind of late. In all honesty, it's really hard to buy presents sometimes, simply because we don't have a car and have to rely on other people to get to places like Mipple (our local department store) in order to do our shopping. I've got a few things for a few people, but I really want to finish out before we do our sending.

If anyone's got anything specific they want, please comment and we'll see what we can do!

I really want to take another trip to Kyoto for shopping and stuff since I think I'm pretty used to the city now, and there's a whole lot of cool things I can pick up there. But every weekend has had something pop up to make it impossible for us to go. Grrrrr.

Though maybe I can find some good stickers in Kyoto, too. I brought some awesome stickers from the dollar store for my classes when I first came here and now I'm almost out of them. They're really weird things like sparkly, strangely colored vegetables. (green carrots, blue pumpkins, purple mushrooms and the like.) The kids just adore them, and the ones here in Japan are cutesy and all but they lack that ridiculous American flavor. Oh well.

We're going to be having another party on the night of the 25th for our English conversation members. The thing that stinks is...I HAVE TO WORK! T____T (that's a crying face). Because the school was closed for so long due to Swine Flu, it cuts into winter vacation. So...work for me. :(

Oh well, it won't be SO bad.

OH MAN

I broke my flippin' tooth!!

My mom sent me a package with some tootsie rolls in it, and I was like "Eh I haven't had a tootsie roll in forever" and tossed it in my mouth.

Then I was like "*crunch crunch crunch* ...Huh...did I hit a sugar deposit or something? Oh well."

Next thing I know there's this big GAP out of the side of my tooth.

Now, granted, it was a tooth (the ONLY tooth) that I had a cavity in a long time ago. A part of the side broke off, absorbed by the horrible goo monster that was the tootsie roll, and you could see the filling right down the middle and everything. I was like "welp."

This happened last night. Today I went to the dentist. Because you can do that in Japan.

The dentist cheerfully informed me that the filling was made of (either silver or mercury -- I'm hoping he meant silver because if it were mercury I'd be seeing wallbunnies and they'd be telling me to kill people with a teapot launcher) and that this was not good for my body or my teeth and wondered if I would rather they just take the filling out and replace it with the white one. I was like "sure."

So they --

-replaced my filling.
-fixed my tooth.
-cleaned my teeth.

Now, the way Japanese health insurance is, you have a 30% copay. I was all like "doom, doom, doom" because American health care is ...so...bloody...expensive...

I paid about 30 bucks.

For all that! I couldn't believe it. It blew my mind more than when we discovered the microwave could have metal in it without exploding.

I go back on the 26th for a follow-up, but for now I'm just amazed at how quickly and cheaply this worked out.