catalina tu vecina

Yes, my mouth is a dental money pit. It all started when I was about ten and the dentist announced that I would need six baby teeth pulled in order to put in a space retainer. In preparation for braces which I would have for half a dozen years. And then another space retainer.

When I was 13, the orthodontist decided to pull my impacted canine teeth located closer to my nose than my gum line. Just in case they interfered with the braces.

Over the years, I had my share of cavities, mercury amalgam fillings which were all replaced with porcelain ones. Am I leaving anything out? Oh, yes, four impacted wisdom teeth pulled, several sessions of periodontal scaling, four veneers, one crown, and two root canals. I now visit the dentist every four months for teeth cleaning and assessment.

I have a love-hate relationship with the oral hygienist. She loves to find major dental flaws and I hate it that she finds these things. Also… I don’t really trust her. She has one mission beyond cleaning my teeth: finding very expensive repair and maintenance work not covered by my insurance. She speaks with a rather thick oriental accent and I speak with a mouth full of instruments which does not allow for a good defense since I cannot articulate. Our most recent conversation went like this:

O.H.: So, how are yew tew-day?

ORTIZZLE: I ‘ine.

O.H.: Goo. Tew-day I weel be clinning ore deeze tartar betwin your teeze. Ooo.. iss like beeg rocks! Wen I em duhn, I giff you fluoride tritment.

ORTIZZLE: I -on’t -ant fluoride.

O.H.: Oh, yew neet fluoride. It proteks your teeze.

ORTIZZLE: -o -it -oesn’t. It’s -oison.

O.H.: Ha, ha, ha. Yew are telleen me deeze? I em dee EX-per!

ORTIZZLE: I an -elling -ou I -on’t -ant fluoride!

O.H.: O.K. Deeze eez you dee-sish-un. Bahd dee-sish-un. Now…. I see yew haff beeg crack een diss tooze. Enny minit eet… fall out! Yew need crown.

ORTIZZLE: Any ‘inute??!! Is ‘at ‘overed ‘y insuran’ ? I ‘eed oo ‘alk oo ah ‘entist.

Enter the dentist. Dentist examines x-ray. Dentist examines tooth. Was the tooth sensitive to cold? No. Well, then, no need to do anything. Yet. Certainly it was not going to fall out any minute.

I get along just fine with the dentist. He understands suggestive selling, but he also understands crappy insurance.

As I was leaving, the oral hygienist gave me my little gift bag with floss, a new toothbrush, and… NO toothpaste. Because it has fluoride. Next time, I will show her my toothpaste secret:

Hotels have always fascinated me. As a temporary home away from home, there are certain requirements that are essential for comfortable travel, however. The older I get, the less I am willing to put up with a lack of the basics… or… the likes of some of the places where I have stayed. So, in no particular chronological order, here are a few of them and my personal ratings:

A fifth-floor walk up in Paris with one elongated rock-hard pillow that spanned the width of the bed. The linen, however, was pristine. If only I had known back then that Europe is on 220V… or that you can buy dual voltage hair dryers. But who cared? I was just out of college, madly in love, and… it was PARIS. I had never stayed anywhere up to that point beyond a Howard Johnson (can you believe they still call it “HoJo” ?!)

A showy place in Hyde Park with an elegant reception area that had nothing to do with the bedsitter of a room where the only place to fit my suitcase was on the end of the bed. Good for keeping your feet warm at night. Or flattening bunions.

The Martha Washington Hotel in New York where I stayed on a trip with my Girl Scout troop. We assured ourselves that it must be safe because it was a hotel “solely for women,” though some of the women wandering around were, uh, a bit odd. To say nothing of the dark, grimy interior with wallpaper that must have been around since the hotel opened in 1903. Martha would have approved, though, since their garb was similar to what she would have worn. (Note the sign on the façade that now boasts “Restaurant for MEN and Women.”)

An attic room in Frankfurt, Germany owned by a gay couple who lovingly decorated it with paintings in garish colors that would make Munch’s The Scream look tame by comparison. Also: seventh floor walk-up with a heavy suitcase as I was attending the Frankfurt Buchmesse and had to carry a mess of books and catalogues to show clients.

A “package deal” hotel in Athens with all of the mod-cons except air-conditioning. It was July and the temperature never dipped below 104F (40 C). What one will do to afford travel. Sigh.

Antón de la Cerda, a sleazy room for two in Sevilla, with a sign outside that simply said “camas” (beds), where I stayed with a friend from England who was visiting me and could afford about the same as me. Camas. The owner told us he would include dinner in the price. This sounded nice at the time, but not so nice perhaps when he invited us into his kitchen to watch him make us each an omelette, licking his blackened fingernails in the process, and telling us what nice young ladies we were and, if we wished, he could show us around town later that night. Later that night we bolted the door, slept not a wink, and checked out at the crack of doom.

Definitely the cheapest pensión in Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. I just googled this photo, and I swear it is the exact place where I stayed all those years ago. What you can’t see is the chamber pot under the bed or the green water that flowed from the taps. But for $3.00 a night and a miniscule view of the cathedral… I would have to rate it as four-star simply because it was clean, central, bug-free, and probably the only time I ever experienced “Europe on $5.00 a day.” Back when that was still possible. Way back.

None of this is to say that I have never stayed anywhere posh. But it would definitely have been on somebody else’s nickel. Like the time my sister and a friend came to visit me in my poverty-stricken early days in Spain and after a long day of traveling decided she wanted to find some decent lodging. She pointed to an extravagant building which I explained to her was the Portuguese Embassy, but it didn’t take her long to latch on to the most expensive hotel in the city (Sevilla, again):

Never mind that we were wearing cut-off jeans and flip-flops. Nothing speaks louder than an American Express gold card. Hers, of course. That was also the one and only time I have ever been in a hotel room with three king-size beds in it. Along with the antechamber, it was bigger than my entire studio apartment.

And, lest I forget: my publishing company sent us out to Segovia, about an hour’s drive from Madrid, and we got to stay at the national parador. With this view:

Which is a far cry from the dump economically-priced motel where I stayed in San Antonio last week while attending the ISTE convention mentioned in the previous post:

I hasten to add that this is the view, not the room. The room itself was actually O.K.: cable T.V., little coffee maker, and an air-conditioner that sounded like a Sherman tank. Just one little quirk, however, which I have never seen before:
Yes, indeed, there must be an answer. Perhaps:
a.) The maid has a fetish for Mickey Mouse.
b.) The maid likes to juggle the receiver before answering the phone.
c.) This is how receivers are meant to be hung up and I have been getting it wrong all these years.

THIS WEEK’S HUMP DAY QUESTION:
Ever stayed at the Hotel from Hell? Or been treated to one of those cool places where you get your own fluffy white bathrobe to keep? Tell me about it.

Yeah. Apparently that means computer literacy. It’s not in any dictionaries yet, and I seriously hope a less awkward word gets coined before this term becomes common parlance.

I am certainly no computer guru which is why I am often amazed when my students say I know all sorts of little tricks they haven’t seen. This is not computer savvy, however. It’s just having worked on computers since the first PCs made their appearance. More or less. Remember the early versions of Word Perfect? How about Word Star? XYwrite, anyone? Allow me to take you back even further…

In the early 80’s I secured a juicy translation contract for a travel guide series called Everything Under the Sun sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. I was part of a team of translators who would be stomping in and out of the publishing company in charge of this project in order to do the translation work on their spiffy new PCs: great hulking monitors with a black screen and amber text. They had the DOS operating system, but this was pre-Windows and the company trained us in the use of Easy Writer. I remember being in absolute awe of being able to produce text on a screen and edit it as I translated.

Did I say edit? Nothing to do with onscreen editing nowadays, but back then, my translations were scribbled out by hand, edited by hand, typed in a first draft version, and usually re-typed once or twice, praying that the sticking keys on my portable Olivetti would behave themselves. Just being able to erase a word and correct it onscreen a bizillion times… and then have a machine print it… that was huge. Cutting and pasting text was monumental. After an hour or so of pounding out my translation, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Then my Grand Larousse bilingual dictionary fell on one of the function keys, which I used to call “F keys.” Very aptly named. Because one of the effin’ F Keys had the happy function of wiping out all the text on the screen, and the function keys in those days were located on the left side of the keyboard. Right where the Grand Larousse made a crash landing on the wipe-out function key. If only I had listened to the editor in charge who warned me to press the save key from time to time.

But I was still madly in love with this device. I made enough money on that job to buy myself my first computer: a Toshiba laptop with two disk drives, one of the first models to go from the 5″ floppies to the 3.5″ disks. Having two disk drives was criticial, since there was no hard drive on this laptop, and hence the operating system disk had to be booted every time I used it. With a second disk drive I could copy to disk without having to remove the OS disk. And of course it was still pre-Windows, but I thought it was the bees knees. I could trot it out to places I translated for and hook it up to any printer. (Something you can’t say about the new Windows Vista, heh, heh). Eventually I got my very own printer with a daisy wheel and a limited choice of fonts. It made a noise like a machine gun, particularly on one occasion when I forgot to close out a bold face code. There was no way of stopping it mid-stream, either, not even by pulling the plug, since it would just keep chugging along where it left off as soon as I plugged it back in. So I had a fifty-two page recording script in bas-relief and a printer ribbon turned into a doilie.

Back to the future. Tracing back my computer literacy was triggered by a news item reporting the fact that John McCain is computer illiterate. And the question to viewers was posed: does it really matter for a president to be computer literate? This led me to think of my own family, my brothers and sister and I all bonafide members of the Boomer generation. It annoys me when members of the younger generation think Boomers are clueless about computers. There are definitely some who are, but I think my generation spans the entire range of computer literacy. Just looking at my siblings will tell you that: 1. Me = average computer knowledge; 2. My sister = rock-bottom computer skills (she’s a nurse, barely uses it at work, but has now learned how to attach a file to an email!); 3. brother no. 1 = no flipping clue, has always relied on others to do the minimum tasks he needs to get by; 4. brother no. 2 = designed the original Compaq computer with a team of six other computer geeks who left T.I. to find fame and fortune. He not only knows what’s on a chip and how to program, he could build you a custom computer from the ground up. He’s my personal computer guru for when I run into snags.

So: Should the Prez have at least basic computer skills? Or can we get by with another G.W.B. who was quoted as saying that people who wanted to help out in a disaster area could just “get on the Internets and dial up [sic] volunteer.org” ? I don’t think a president needs to be in the geek category, but frankly, somebody who has to ask his wife to hook up the contraption doesn’t send out a message of representing a modern industrial nation. There are a million reasons why I could never vote for McCain (or any Republican), but this would be another big one. It tells me he is resistent to change, stuck in his ways, and in major technological denial. Not that we needed his computer illiteracy to figure that out.

And what did the general public have to say? Even an aging woman interviewed on the street said she taught herself to use a computer. Another passer-by who was interviewed said, “It doesn’t matter. The president has more important things to deal with. Other people can handle the computer work.” Indeed. Should he have to spend hours on a computer preparing a Power Point presentation? Not really. Should he know that the CD drive isn’t a cup-holder? Maybe.

Next week I have to complete my professional development requirement for the year. This year’s task? Attending the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) conference. I picture myself being surrounded by geeky types… but also run-of-the-mill folks like me who just want to learn how to use one more gadget in the classroom.

Want to see how computer literate you are? Here’s a Computacy Test. (go on then, it’s only 10 questions)