1. Mel Hurtig is dead. We owe him a debt of joyous gratitude that the Canadian Encyclopedia exists in any format today.

2. Randall Denley used his column in today's hardcopy edition of the Ottawa Citizen to call for the dismantling of medicare in Canada.

These are not things anyone sane should have to process on the way to work.

I've been putting this off for hours. Seven or eight hours, probably. It's difficult to be certain of the specifics right now. As it happens, robertjsawyer put me back on track over on Facebook when he linked to this Vancouver Sun article on heart attack survival rates in high-altitude places.

I went to my dentist's office-clinic this afternoon for a session with one of the dental hygenists on duty. They'd fallen behind the way they sometimes do when they're dealing with a heavy workload. I was already irritated by having to walk it from the local Transitway hub to their building in mid-minus-10 to 20 temperatures that wind chill had aggravated, and in addition to that, I found myself having to fill out and sign new legal paperwork on an iPad. You'd think someone used to working with Apple gear at home wouldn't have that much trouble with those, but actually signing an e-document with a stylus or your own fingertip isn't easy without lots of practice.

The wait time didn't help my mood after that, but again: heavy workload despite the ongoing competition for patients. This is a partnership that lots of people in Orléans rightly trust, and have done for decades. Despite the refitting of the facility and the changes in partner dentists and their affiliated hygenists, that's not going to change any time in the near future.

The refit also threw me off.

Then as I was settling into the chair for the checkup and cleaning, the hygenist - also new to me - gave me the news that is still sinking in.

My dentist had died on the weekend.

Not my current dentist. He'd taken over the slot in my health care team a few years ago, and it's my hope that I'll be able to keep him for a few decades yet. Assuming neither of us meets with either accident, foul play or bad self-maintenance consequences.

Rather, the first dentist to work with me as their patient after I'd moved to Ottawa was dead. He'd died at  a local ski resort, of a heart attack during the weekend. If memory serves, it was my father who'd introduced me to this dentist back in the late 1980's. I can't remember the exact year right now, and I suppose it would be a bit much to ask the clinic staff to start rummaging through whatever files they still have from those days, even if conversion into e-docs is an ongoing process meeting with some level of success right now.

He once actually accepted one of my inked sketches as partial payment for work he'd done. It was a decade or more ago, so I'm hoping it stayed with him until his end. My ego would be glad of it.

But not too glad. This was someone who managed to keep me at ease, even during the most involved work on the inside of my mouth, refitting old fillings or building new ones. I'd gotten comfortable with him doing that work, and it's taken a while for the new guy and I to get to that same degree of comfort. Not through any fault of his, but rather that I'm still out of sorts for my own set of reasons.

After I left, I found myself muttering curses not so quietly while walking back along St. Joseph Boulevard to Place d'Orléans. I was sad, I was angry. I'd fallen out of touch since he'd left the partnership. I'd wanted to find a way to get caught up on all manner of things.

Not going to happen now, not in any direct way.

One more thing to deal with along the road...and one less trusted soul to share with.

So...starting another week of job-hunting, chores, research, and so on.

Christmas week? Just another week full of all of the above. Also, remembering Dad anew, because 2002.

More on other stuff later...

Originally posted by james_nicoll at Marilee Layman (1955 - 2013)

To those who killed Sitara Achakzai in Kandahar today, I tell you this:

You've made a martyr of her. Surely you must understand this by now?