This post contains three logically disjoint sections held together only by their temporal coherence.

For the past few weeks, I've been having periodic border skirmishes with the local ant population. They'd send a dozen or so troops to attack some random fixture in my apartment--the toilet, the bathroom sink, my kitchen counter top--and I'd quickly destroy them all by physical crushing and send them to a watery grave. Today, however, they made a large scale assualt. When I arrived home after work, they had put well over one hundred troops to the mission of invading my kitchen sink. I considered this act to be the final straw and, after killing them all in various ways (mainly smashing and drowning as before), I decided to resort to chemical weapons. Hopefully, the use of these won't be considered a war crime. More importantly, I hope that this solves the border dispute once and for all.

Earlier today, I finally went to my dentist (Dental Plus+) to pay to have my fillings done. I had originally been told of the need to have the fillings done nearly a month ago, but between homecoming and various other things, I had been unable to find time to make it there to pay (I'm going with the Resins after all) until today. I arrived at approximately 2 minutes of 5 (they're open to at least 6, so no issue there), but I was forced to wait to talk to a "payment counselor" for over 50 minutes (my clock read 5:54). I found this wholely unacceptable and made my feelings known to the "payment counselor". I further told her that this would be the final payment that Dental Plus would receive from me. I intend to find a new dentist so that I may switch as soon as this last work from them is done. I should not have to wait to pay someone. At most, maybe I should wait less than 5 minutes in the off chance that there are people waiting to be handled by a receptionist. Anything over 20 minutes is completely unacceptable.

I've been thinking a bit about how I'm going to handle Xmas this year. Of course, there are various machinations that I may go through in an attempt to visit the TX initiation, but that may or may not be possible depending on scheduling. Aside from that though, I'm considering taking an alternate travel root home: Southwest Chief. It is a 2200 mile Amtrak train route that goes between LA and Chicago (plus another jump for me from Chicago to Indianapolis). I think that such a trip would probably be a one-way affair (with an airplane on the return trip), but I'd like to try it at least once to really have a lot of time to just veg out, relax and see the "fly-over" states. The total trip would be a full two days (just under 28 hours from Union Station, LA to somewhere in Indianapolis) and would cost about the same as airfare for the same distance and time of year (about $250 one way). I've never gone any real distance by train and think that it might be an interesting learning experience.



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