Apparently, Novocaine is for wimps? As a result of not flossing basically my whole life, I seem to have developed some cavities, and my dentist recommended that he fill them (and charge me for it? lol, a bit self-serving there, but, it makes sense). So, I got 2 of them filled today, and, he wanted to numb my jaw, which is standard procedure. But ( Read more... )

Peanut Brittle: candy that sounds like LEGOs.

It's been a while since I've read anything quite this profound. For anybody who considers themselves religious, especially anybody of Christian or Jewish faith, I literally beg you to go read this:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/karaite_korner_news/message/253

For anybody not familiar with Judaism and the Karaite movement specifically, here is a ( glossary of terms )

Property insurance is a good thing. I have always thought of it as an expensive exercise in prudence. But when something relatively valuable that I owned becomes destroyed.... you know, if I didn't have insurance, at least owning it outright, I don't owe on something I can no longer use, it's just a physical tool, no matter how nice, and when I ( Read more... )

I've figured out why "Smooth Jazz" music is so annoying to me. For example, I find a particular local San Diego radio station, KIFM (Smooth Jazz 98.1), almost entirely repulsive to listen to. Nevertheless, I found myself listening to it for about 2 minutes the other night (I was driving and happened to punch the wrong button and was thinking ( Read more... )

I was driving to work this morning and I happened to tune in our local classical music radio station, and the last movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony was on. I'm not normally a big fan of Beethoven's 5th symphony--I like his 6th and 9th symphonies much better--the general popularity of the 5th symphony in society being more or less irrelevant to ( Read more... )

I find it interesting... that any time I have a dream in which I'm "at home" in a house, it's always the house that I grew up in, for the first 16 and a half years of my life in Altadena, CA. I can be all grown up in my dream, dreaming about things that are happening currently in my life, and yet if the setting of the dream is a specific house ( ( Read more... )

There are many reasons in life to care about things. Sometimes we care about things because we can't help it. These can be people: relatives, friends, and loved ones. They can be hobbies that for some reason come straight from the depths of our being so that it's impossible not to be interested in them. I have a theory that it's even possible ( Read more... )

I've been told by those who know (i.e., keepers of the family wisdom) that I was a little confused in my entry about zucchini (this entry), and that the food which needs the bitterness rubbed out is cucumbers. And this does make more sense, because, zucchini is something you expect to be bitter whereas cucumbers you want to be mild. Oh well, no ( Read more... )

... by two of my live journal friends, to list 5 (or 6) favorite songs of the moment. Only trouble is, as a professional musician, the songs that have been running through my head for the last couple months have been exclusively the songs I've been rehearsing. So the songs in my "top-five" list reflect my favorites of my recent music work rather ( Read more... )