NOTE: This longer post does not have any photos.
WEDNESDAY 17 and THURSDAY 18 July 2024 — Dental, walking, mowing, and a global IT outage
Wednesday 17 … Highway construction, a motorcade, and dental deconstruction
I had an appointment late morning with our dentist to deal with the right rear-most, lower tooth that had lost its partial crown about two (2) weeks ago. In all the time we have lived in Michigan (since 1976) I have never seen so much road construction as we have at the moment, so I left early to make sure I wasn’t late. Major highways are being widened all over SE lower Michigan, and flex-lanes are being added or extended on the highways to run through our local community area. The amount of equipment I passed today on I-96 was epic. At one point there were 12 gravel haulers lined up nose-to-tail waiting their turn to dump their loads. There were two concrete forming machines in operation, several very large cranes, and all sorts of excavators, cutters, rollers, concrete mixers. My best guess was at least 50 pieces of heavy equipment, much of it specialized to road construction. It was fascinating to see and, fortunately, there were no major traffic backups.
Close to the clinic, I headed west on Michigan Avenue to make the U-turn (Michigan left) back to the clinic. I noticed a LOT of flashing emergency lights, and not long after pulling into the U-turn, a motorcade went by (westbound) probably headed to the Detroit (Wayne County) Metropolitan Airport. I later learned that the motorcade was transporting Vice-President Kamal Harris following a speaking engagement in Detroit.
At the clinic, the dentist made an adjustment to one of my night-time bight guards and then got to work on my tooth. He decided to remove some of the existing tooth to allow the new crown to be thicker on top (that’s were the old one failed) and to come down around the tooth closer to the gum line for a more secure fitment. With the tooth prepared, he used the photo/laser scanning system to “map” the inside of my mouth on my right side. The scans included the upper and lower teeth (mouth open) and the outside of the teeth in the closed position. The new crown will be ceramic (Zirconia) and should be ready in about two weeks.
The dental assistant fitted a temporary crown, which was quite a procedure in its own right. It will protect the tooth until I get the permanent crown, but I was advised to still chew on the left side and avoid hard, crunchy, and gooey/sticky foods. Before leaving the clinic, I made an appointment for August 8th to have the new crown fitted. The tooth is still “sensitive” when touched in certain ways, so I suspect the temporary crown does not completely protect the lower back side.
Thursday 18 … Walking, mowing, and seeing what’s behind you; and a major computer outage!
Linda met up with our daughter around 9:30 AM to walk a portion or the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail. From the Michigan History Center (Michigan.gov): “The Trail runs 33 miles between Hamburg Township in Livingston County (US-23 and M-36) and Blackman Township in Jackson County (near Stockbridge). Opened to the public in 1994 as the Lakelands Trail State Park, it is a popular destination for people looking to enjoy the outdoors. The trail is also a component of the Great Lake to Lakes Trails Route #1, which extends 275 miles from South Haven (Lake Michigan) to Port Huron (Lake Huron). Local philanthropist, Mike Levine, contributed extensive resources to transform the corridor into an improved trail. In 2018, the DNR changed the trail’s name to the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park in recognition of Mike’s efforts.”
Our property was not completely dry after the rains last night, but I wanted to get the grass cut sooner rather than later so it had time to grow before next Tuesday when Keith would once again be here. I had the lawn tractor out of the shed and ready to go by 10 PM. I decided to set the mowing deck at its highest setting, so the grass would be long enough by next Tuesday to make it worth having Keith show up. I decided to cut the grass on the west half of the property on a SE-NW diagonal and the grass on the east half of the property on a SW-NE diagonal. On the west side, that meant I was cutting across the old furrows left over from when this property was part of farm (many, many years ago). The lawn tractor does not have a suspension, so I got beat up today. Keith usually mows on an E-W orientation, which makes for a smoother experience. Both he and I have to deviate from that, of course, to go around trees, stumps, buildings, the firepit, and along the edges of driveway as well as stands of trees and bushes. But that was the general idea for today. I worked until 1600, with a 30-minute break for lunch around 12:30. I was tired, but it felt good to have this done.
Linda got home around 1300 and had a bite of lunch. She took her car to Serra Honda for a 14:30 appointment to have the glass portion of the driver-side rearview mirror replaced. The labor was more than the part, but it required some special tools and knowledge to remove the old one without breaking plastic retaining tangs or the housing. Besides, if the technician dropped the new mirror, it would be at the dealer’s expense, not ours.
Sometime during the day, or perhaps it was overnight last night, an update of the CrowdStrike security software was pushed to their clients with a bug in it that caused a world-wide outage of computers running the Windows operating system, including Windows Server and Windows Enterprise. The event was well-covered in the media, so I don’t need to repeat it here. We were not doing anything at the time that might have been impacted, so for us it was just an interesting and curious news story. But for many people, especially those traveling, and for many (most?) of the really big corporations around the world, and even governments, it was a major disruptive event.
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