I discovered an important thing yesterday morning.

When Kellogg's puts a warning on their Pop-Tart toaster Danishes that the icing gets extremely hot, they mean it.

Yeah, I was a clever fellow. My Danishes were done in the toaster oven, and I knew they'd be hot. So I figured I could just reach in and sort of 'flick' the little buggers out onto the plate. Limited touch = no burn.

I kind of forgot that hot icing is sticky.

So the fingertip of my index finger on my right hand - my mouse-clicking finger, my shoelace-tying finger, one of two typing fingers - has a distinctive blister in a neat little curly design.

I'm a genius.

So my tooth is marginally better.

Matters had gotten much worse after I first mentioned my troubles back in February. We eventually gave up on waiting for Lisa's health plan to come through, and I went straight to the dentist to see what he could do for me.

You see, I was at the point where I was taking the maximum daily dosage of both Tylenol Extra-Strength and Advil. The nice thing about taking those two medications is that since they work on different biological paths to stop your pain, you can take them together if necessary. And boy was it getting necessary.

Anyway. The dentist was able to get me in for an emergency examination. He took an x-ray, examined it, and said, "Boy. That's a big hole in your tooth."

I indicated how exactly helpful I thought his comment was and asked him for some details. Seems he thinks it was not a filling that fell out, but an actual chunk of tooth. Nice.

He then lined up my options. I can either A) get it extracted for $200 and then have a bridge put in for $1500, or B) having an $800 root canal and a $800 crown.

Regardless of my choice, I would have to wait a month for the earliest appointment.

I was tempted to go find another dentist at this point, but I've got great loyalty for this fellow. Five years ago, when the crown he had put in popped out, forcing me to extract the remainder of the tooth and get a bridge, he waived his half of the $1500 fee. With the insurance I had at the time, I ended up getting the bridge for free. That sort of savings begets much loyalty from me. So what's a little pain?

He gave me some penicillin to take down the infection, and a painkiller called Toradol to tide me over until the penicillin did its job. Two days later I was back in his office in agony. Not only had the penicillin not made any noticeable difference yet, but also the Toradol had less pain-killing power than a warm cup of tea.

He coughed up a tougher antibiotic with three more syllables than it's predecessor, and some Tylenol 3's. Normally T3's do the trick for anyone, for although each pill actually has less acetaminophen than an extra-strength Tylenol, they do have a healthy dollop of Codeine.

The first pill made my groggy and held back the pain for six hours. The second made my a little sleepy and worked for 4. The third had no discernable effect on my brain, and only stopped the pain for two hours, making them less effective than basic Tylenol.

The new antibiotic seemed to turn the corner though, and I actually had a day where I no longer felt like some painkiller junkie.

Not sure what happened then. Either it was a relapse of the infection or I managed to jam a piece of popcorn into what we now believe is an exposed nerve in the tooth, but the pain surged back to a level where nothing whatsoever was holding back the pain for longer than an hour.

The folks at the hospital were not so helpful. Once we got past my embarrassment at being there at all (I had a rough time walking past bleeding people in wheelchairs just to tell the attending nurse that I was here with a toothache), we got stuck in a side room with the rest of the walking wounded for two hours.

Finally a doctor came to examine my tooth. He looked at it with a tongue depressor and a light, and then rapped on the tooth with the tongue depressor. "Does that hurt?" he asked.

I didn't say anything, but the tears in my eyes were sufficient answer.

He suspected the popcorn theory was correct, and gave me a half dozen Percocet to get me through the night. And, despite his appalling lack of sympathy for my poor condition, he was right. Not about the Percocet, which had an effect quite similar to my Tylenol 3 experience of a few days ago, but in that the pain rapidly went away in the next few days.

That brings me to the present. The tooth still hurts, but chewing on the other side of my mouth prevents the jamming of iron needles into the open nerve, and one basic pain killer every three to six hours takes care of the rest.

And I discovered today, as I was taking a Tylenol 3 at work, that my developed immunity to painkillers was fading, and Codeine now had it's full effect once again. This is good, because I can get full usage out of them, but bad because I almost did a face plant on the boardroom table during a staff meeting.

The office dynamic has changed again.

Last week the bosses announced they planned to move most people's workstations in our department. The whole plan was to streamline the work process, by placing people who communicate a lot together in one area. Makes sense. If you talk to one person 18 times a day, why should you have to walk all the way across the office to do so every time.

This does not so much matter to me, because in the course of a day, I talk to EVERYONE.

Regardless, on Friday we all shifted spots. I made a diagonal move all the way across the room and discovered that my new real estate was half of what I had previously. Admittedly, I was a bit spoiled before, but my new spot only had room for my laptop and my PC. If I wanted room to write something on paper I had to close my laptop and slide it under my shelf unit.

As a bonus, I was now situated right outside the glass wall to my boss's office. Straight line of sight from him to either of my monitor screens. Swell.

Once we all settled in, our technical guy discovered he had an entire island to himself (the other workstations were to become 'storage') so he reorganized the area to give himself one long sweeping bench to fit his four workstations.

This move inspired the bosses again, thus prompting another reorganization of my particular area in a similar configuration. I now share a long workspace with one of our designers. I have more than enough room to stretch again.

Needless to say, not a heck of a lot of work got done Friday.

On Survivor: Good twist last week, eh? They turfed their best teammate. The guy who gave them the best chances to win challenges and they chucked him out. Wow. Down in flames kids.

On Buffy: Don't like where the show is going. With Willow and Buffy going through relationship Hell, Xander and Anya were supposed to be the stable side of things, the one continuing relationship to show that sometimes things do work out. And now every character is miserable. Where the hell are they going to go with this? Nuts.

Mom Rating: 3 out of 5. It's good that my teeth are not hurting so much. Mom thinks I should be more careful around toaster pastry though.

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Take me home, big fella