It's Tuesday!

On Friday, Feb 6th, I endured about 30 mins of dental surgery. I've been suffering in various degrees ever since. It's finally gotten to the point where it does not really hurt on it's own. That took about 9 days. Now I have to do something to make it hurt. Like talk. Or breathe deeply. Or sneeze. Or spit. Not that I'm a frequent spitter. I'm not one to go walking down the road spitting to and fro. Hi, nice to meet you (spit), nice dog ya got there (spit). That's not me. I can easily control any excess expectoration, 'cause that's one bad habit I never had. But I don't know how to keep from sneezing if I have to sneeze. And my gum is still swollen in the area, so that feels wierd. Here's one of the problems: my sinus cavity was 'engaged'. That was not unexpected, but it makes things problematic, at least for me. So anyway, I've not felt very well the last 10 days or so, and that's why I haven't been around much.

One thing I did do, because it gives me the opportunity to think or not think, depending on how I feel, was play several games of Civilization. I'm still stuck in Civ III, which is 4 or 5 years old, I know, so just dont worry about it all you civ junkies. I haven't played it in a long, long time. Each game of course takes hours and hours, and since my attention frequently wanders, they'll last the course of several days. This makes it hard to get the big empire building picture sometimes, but it's one of the things I live with. Civ also seems to display your inner personality - you find out if you're methodical or wild as can be, in case you didnt know. I generally let the game choose which Civilization I'm the leader of, and this one game I came up Dutch. Well that's cool, William of Orange and all, at one time the Dutch were a world power. They were the first colonists of what is now New York. Ever been to Hoboken, NJ? Dutch name. As is Harlem. So anyway, I'm peacefully building an nice respectable civilization, getting along fine with everyone, when I developed steam power and was looking forward with untold glee to building railroads, which increases production, movent ability, the works. But I found much to my dismay that in the whole big ol' country of mine I had no coal resources, thus could not build railroads. I try to trade with every other civilization, but they were either not advanced enough to care about coal, or if they were, they weren't trading. I noticed that another civilization bordering mine had a coal resource (interesting how these things frequently seem to be on the border of civilizations), and so, as quickly as I could, I mobilized my military units, put everybody on a war-time footing, and attacked, throwing centuries of peace down the drain. I figured I'd grab the area that had that resource, then hold on for dear life, make life miserable for the neighbors, and eventually they'd ask for peace, I'd agree, and life would return to normal and I could build railroads. It worked. It's such a 19th century thing to do. My goal in that game was not to conquer the world but to win by points, because of economic & cultural development. Anway, I did stuff like that for a few days.