My little neighborhood is one street long, with 12 little houses, and ends in an apartment complex. We are on a - whaddya call it, transformer? grid? all to ourselves, so when our power goes out, it's just us. The houses across the main road from us and the fancy townhouses behind us always have power; it's just this one little side road that's dark. My house is the only one visible from the main road as you drive from town. This summer, with three power outages so far, I've taken to leaving my outside light on at night after thunderstorms, so my neighbors approaching on the main road will know that we have power. I don't even like most of my neighbors. Why do I feel compelled to provide a largely-unneeded public service?

Calli, Amyth, amych, I will keep you posted! I am hoping we fly to Raleigh; I've never been and I would love for some of the thousands of dollars we've spent on airline travel to have an acual pleasurable social component!

Thanks for the offers of hospitality.

We left our stainless flatware behind for StY when we moved, and when we arrived, we needed flatware. We started looking around, and like Suzi, we hefted and held and pretended to eat with several different styles, weights, and patterns of flatware. And wound up buying the same pattern again. We like it. It's a simple, plain fiddleback style.

I think it's nice of you, Zen, and I would appreciate it. But you don't have to do it either.

I have the opposite thing, because my draconian hoa (in self sufficient Az, go figure) has our segment of the neighborhood with buried lines. We almost never lose power, but out neighbors do.

Thanks to Mom, I have a collection of Harlequin plates, bowls, teacups, etc. in a random assortment of colors. I adore them. They're made by the same company that made Fiestaware, but the pieces are not as chunky as Fiesta.

My set is Heinrich "Brookside," that my dad bought for his mom when he was in Germany after WWII. [link]

Except my version doesn't have the gold rim. I'd like to fill out the set, since a few pieces have been broken over the years. But I can't find any without the gold rim.

We replaced our wedding dishes after 10 years once we'd moved three times and were down to our last salad plate. We bought these, which I love. The bowls are especially awesome.

I have been idly looking for new flatware forEVER. I feel like none of the big spoons in sets are actually soup spoons -- they are all so flat.

So I had my teeth cleaned today (on the fly, someone else had cancelled). I have gum pain. And two more cleanings to go through. My teeth are a mess.

Kat, I literally feel your pain. I also had my teeth cleaned yesterday and my gums hate me for it. (Apparently if I would just fucking floss, my gums wouldn't hate me so much.) Still, I love my new dentist. It's like having that first relationship with a partner who actually treats you well, after a string of partners who treat you like shit. Seriously, I had NO idea how bad my previous dentist was until I went to this one.

And today I have an appointment with the periodontist who will pull my cracked tooth and ultimately put in the staggeringly expensive, not-covered-by-insurance implant tooth. (Uh, not pull the tooth today, I don't think. I'm pretty sure this is just a consultation, although I really want to just get this fucking ordeal over with.)

I've been having an inordinate amount of stress about this whole cracked-tooth-needs-to-be-pulled-and-replaced-by-a-cyborg-implant situation. Stress that it has to happen at all, stress about the cost, lots of self-hatred for not taking care of myself to the point where I am losing a tooth, and befuddlement and angst about why in the FUCK a grown-ass adult wouldn't take care of herself.

So July has been fun.

Unrelatedly, square coffee mugs sound like a prank.

I believe teeth cracking is just a result of Bad Teeth, not bad tooth care. At least, I believe that for myself, so I might as well believe it for you, too!

Also, don't get me started on flossing. I have found that flossing the day or two before the dentist is a distaster, because it means my gums start out puffy. (I am aware that actually flossing every day would probably prevent this altogether, but whatever.)