06 march 2025
I'm not sure what I'll write about here. I got a broken tooth removed last week. And earlier this week we visited some hot springs and an old monastery. Both things very cool. Hot springs and monastery, I mean. Not the tooth.
My dental health has been a disaster since I can remember. Countless cavities, and that time one of my wisdom teeth decided to grow sideways instead of up, causing a cyst that required oral surgery (requiring the surgeon to remove some jaw bone and extract a couple extra pieces...) . And the time the other one only got out halfway, having to be extracted. Fun times.
I guess this is in great part my own fault. Or my parents', perhaps. I drank a lot of coca-cola as a kid, and they didn't properly enforce a "brush your teeth" routine. I only started brushing my teeth properly regularly as a teenager, and I suspect much damage was already done. Also, I don't think the copious amounts of cofee, and the smoking, help, either.
Anyway, that's that. Last Sunday we got on the van, and on Monday morning we got to take a bath in some hot springs, which left us quite exhausted. Funny how that works. On Tuesday, we did a guided visit to a 12th century monastery (it has been restored and re-built several times well into the 20th century). Ten monks still live there nowadays, the youngest one being 29. Vary interesting, all of it.
Talking about this with my parents, they mentioned that they visited this same monastery years ago, and when they did, it was all overgrown and almost in ruins. It was great seeing it all cleaned up and looking beautiful.
This visit reminded me how my wife and I recently visited the ruins of Fountains Abbey, York Minster and Southwell Minster in our Christmas trip to the UK. It seems that this is something we do now: we visit churches and stuff. In a different trip, we visited St. James's Church at Picadilly, to see the wood carvings by Grinling Gibbons [1]. We are in our forties now, so I guess this is age-appropriate. "It's important to stay active", as they said in HIMYM.
[1] https://www.grinlinggibbonsphotos.com/saint-james-piccadilly/
Anyhow, that's what's going on in my life these days. I also went to the clinic so they got some blood for some tests this very morning. All very exciting.
Take care!