For my 6th or 7th birthday I got a jokebook from some one (no clue anymore who) and I drove my parents crazy with repeating all the jokes (at least all the ones that I understood). One of the (well known) bad ones was:

Q: When does a Chinese man go the dentist?
A: 2:30

Exactly 2 weeks ago, one day after I decided to visit Holland for a while, my tooth started to hurt. Well, I thought it was my tooth that hurt. I mean, I had never had any cavities and I wasn’t really sure what’s supposed to hurt then. It started out with not being able to bite properly, because the gums around the tooth hurt a bit. I thought it wasn’t too serious and decided not to do anything about it; I was planning to see the dentist the next week, when I was in Holland, anyway; a couple of days wouldn’t matter. After four days though, the pain worsened, I couldn’t eat properly and when I pressed on the gum, pus came out. This really freaked me out and being the optimist I am I started imagining all the possible scenario’s. What started with “The tooth will have to be filled.” turned into “I need a root canal!” and eventually ended with a “They’re going to pull my tooth out!!! And then I won’t be pretty anymore!!!”

I still decided not to take any action; it was a Sunday in a place where I didn’t completely understand the health insurance and didn’t even have a dentist, and it was one day before leaving to Holland (where I did have full health insurance and a dentist I’ve been going to for 13 years). The dentist only had a spot for me on Thursday, but after some pleading I could also stop by on Tuesday afternoon after all the regular appointments to have a quick check. So Tuesday (one week after it started hurting) the dentist finally had a look at it and told me it was “just” an infection of the gum (actually from cleaning too intensely). So no root canals or tooth pulling! I did, however, have to come back on that Thursday for my normal appointment and he would give me an anesthetic and “clean the whole thing out”. He also made some x-ray photo’s, just to be sure there wasn’t anything else.

That Thursday the dentist gave the local anesthetic and within 10 minutes he was done with cleaning everything. Since then the pain has almost gone completely. So that’s the end of the story, right? Wrong. The dentist also showed the x-ray photos which he made 2 days earlier and asked me what I saw. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for and just pointed at the gum which was infected. I was completely looking in the wrong direction. Turns out that my wisdom teeth (both bottom ones, didn’t make a photo of the top ones) are ‘horizontally impacted’, meaning they’re not growing upwards, erupting through the gum, but heading straight into another tooth. Not that they’ll bulldoze through the tooth or anything like that, but if left like it is it could get infected.

Meaning they’ll have to be pulled.

And because they’re horizontal, the top has to be sliced first before the root can be pulled.

I am so not looking forward to that.

It’s been a very busy week for me and I haven’t had time yet to post about any of the stuff I’ve done. So here’s a quick overview of what I’ve been doing. Reviews will come soon, I promise.

Tuesday: Went to Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix
Thursday: Moo’s Hot and Sticky Summer Party
Friday: Read all the summaries of Harry Potter Books 1 to 5 and reread Book 6 (in 9 hours!)
Saturday: Patiently waiting for HP Book 7 and then madly reading once it was delivered :D.
Sunday: Still reading HP7, went to an evening preview of Transformers (very cool!!), continued reading HP7 till 4am and finished it 😀

Okay, I know, I know. I had promised to write in “the next couple of days” and big surprise…I didn’t. So, what been going on with me lately? For starters, I am now officially Dutch. Last October I applied for the naturalisation procedure (sounds creepy, like some weird medical treatment), filled in all the forms…and tada!! Half a year later, I’m an official cheese head. 😀

Nowadays you have to go the naturalisation ceremony to pick up the official letter; you don’t turn Dutch until you’ve picked it up. As most of you may know, I was kind of dreading this, expecting you’d have to sing the national anthem or put your hand on the bible, swear, etc. or something corny like that. Luckily it wasn’t anything like that. It was actually more like my “propedeuse” or bachelor ceremony; some guy you don’t know holds a speech, everybody gets called to the front, you get your degree/paper/whatever and it’s all extremely boring.

I will absolutely try this time to write a bit more then usual. I’m not going to promise anything anymore, cause that just doesn’t seem to work anyway.

Two days ago (Wednesday night) I arrived back in London, after a very exhausting visit to Holland. Somehow Cristiano and me managed to fill that one week with slightly more activities then we imagined. We managed to do everything we wanted, but it was all quite tiring.

Click on to read a day by day description. (more…)

Okay, it’s been more then a month since my last blog post, while I promised to write something everday. My new Month’s Resolutions weren’t that successfull: I did eat icecream, I didn’t write for my blog and I sort of sticked to my deadlines.

Well, attempt number 2! Let’s see how these resolutions are upheld this month.

I kind of figured out that I haven’t really been that productive lately. It’s not as if I’ve been doing nothing at all; quite the contrary: I’ve read a lot of papers, rewritten quite a bit of my literature research paper, discovered the joys of del.icio.us, Vienna and Growl, started my own blog, went to my first Girl Geek Dinner and celebrated my birthday. But I haven’t been able to stick to my deadlines, which I really have to start doing.

So because today is March the 1st, I’ve decided to make a list of my New Month’s Resolutions:

1. Deadlines are holy. I must stick to them no matter what.
2. I should write a new post for my blog every day.
3. No more ice cream!

Well, let’s see how long I can keep this up. The first is a must, but the second and third? We’ll see how they go ;-).

As everybody seems to have a blog nowadays, I finally decided to start my own. Here you will find my various ramblings about movies, tv series, computer related stuff and of course all my interesting adventures.