The descriptions I use to describe my site vary, but one of them picked up by some of the search engines is: "A daily journal with photographs kept by an old fart in his mid fifties", which I kind of like, but probably won't win the Internet Hall Of Fame Marketing Award for hot personal site promotion. Except I've noticed every day or two someone is visiting my site from one or another of the search engines looking for the word "fart" in the title. Every day. Or two. Lots of them.

Who looks for the word "fart" other than eight year old kids? I figure my journal is getting a light rain of eight year old adventurers looking for hilarious material. I mentioned this to Dan at work and he thought it was pretty funny too, saying that his own son, now 12 and properly immersed in major league baseball, at 7 thought the word "fart" and any related bathroom stuff was the height of the hilarious. Great. My site attracts seven year old kids looking for bathroom jokes. Which is kind of funny, I guess, as think of it.

I had the "rubber bands" and the wire removed Thursday afternoon. I'd thought, somehow, that the braces around the teeth would be removed as well, but just the wire and rubber bands came out with two rubber bands remaining, one on either side of the mouth. The stitches in the scalp were removed, no big deal, and I was sent home with the instruction to return in two weeks to finish the process. So. Two more weeks of eating through a straw, but I'm able to open the teeth (and brush the teeth) and take such things as pills without having to grind them into a powder mixed with water, draw them up in a plastic syringe, slide the rubber tube back between the cheek and the molars and shoot it into the back of my mouth. This was funky, but worked with all but one of them that didn't want to mix with water and clumped up in little yellow balls stuck between my teeth and the braces.

To experiment I took a small piece of hamburger and fried it up with an equal amount of finely diced mushrooms, a little tomato sauce and pepper. Ungainly, pushing it up under the front teeth on a spoon, nothing you'd want to do with people watching, but, since you didn't really have to chew, just suck on it a bit and swallow is was OK. I can drink now from a glass if I'm careful. The swelling hasn't totally subsided, but it isn't that noticeable unless you're looking pretty close and two rubber bands are reasonably unobtrusive. So today I went to work for the first time since Monday the 5th and survived. A toe in the pond to test water temperature with a weekend ahead for any needed recuperation. Progress.