There’s something about sitting in a waiting room that is mind numbingly boring.  It’s as if you can feel the weight of your head and eyelids literally increase with each passing second.  Your brain shuts off any ability to have constructive thought and time begins its slow and torturous crawl toward your release from purgatory.  Seconds feel like hours, minutes like days, and the actual time you are forced to absorb the bright fluorescent lights and sterile atmosphere feels like an eternity.  It doesn’t matter if you’re in an upscale dentist office in a tropical paradise or a third world shit hole thanking God your wife wasn’t decapitated.  Once your over the “worry factor” your only left with the after school detention for adults feeling.

One would imagine with all this perceived extra time I would be able to write a series of novels that could be made into a TV special or an over-acted/non-acted movie trilogy.  Nothing to complicated of course.  Something with the same amount of substance as the Twilight fecal matter that has been polluting movie screens across the world.  Not that I have read any of the books, but I have been in the unfortunate position of having viewed a few of the films.  I will say one thing positive about them though, its wonderful we have extended the Special Olympics to include acting as an event.  It’s just too bad that chick that plays the lead role won’t even come close to meddling.

Unfortunately, instead of doing anything productive with my free time, I just stare at the tablet with distaste and attempt to find other forms of “entertainment”.

It’s just me and that stack of magazines from two years ago.  Most of which I  wouldn’t read even if they were up to date (or in this particular case, in my native language).  But I  know the time will come when I pick up that one picture heavy magazine for the second time to ensure I didn’t miss any of the riveting photos I’m sure it contains. . .

The only thing my mind does seem to be doing effectively is math.  Simple addition and subtraction,  conversions.  12,000 – 18,000 for each root canal, 10,000 – 12,000 for the crowns that need to go over each tooth, at least two teeth. . .  that we know of, and yep, there goes two grand of our travel money right there.

Its humbling to face the reality that your dream of exploring the world indeed does have a point where it must end.  It brings you to your knees when that ending point is abruptly moved closer by a few months due to unforseen events.

During our travels, our year-long trip morphed into the dream of being on the road for a year and a half.  We already added on Ireland for St. Patties day and our anniversary.  We also started to look into volunteering in a central American country for a couple of months.  Then the plan was to swing through Oklahoma for the Army reunion and drive up the west coast.  Making it to Seattle just in time for the Fourth of July and the Seattle International Beerfest.

The only problem is we only saved enough money for exactly the trip we planned when we left.  Not the elevated lifestyle we lived out in Brazil, the extra 20+ days we extended South Africa, and certainly not the pit stop in Ireland.  Reality didn’t catch up with our dreams until we were forced to look at things closer due to the trip to the dentist.

At least there are worse places to be stuck for a couple of weeks.  The dentist office was conveniently located on Koh Samui’s best beach, Chaweng.  The beach is lined with resorts, bars, restaurants, clubs, Muay Thai, shops, and message/beauty spots.  We are going to be forced to sit at the beach, drink rum, and chill out.  (What a terrible thing to have happen to us.)

It had been an hour since Sally disappeared into the back of th dentist office.  Last time we went to the dentist in Bangkok, her analysis visit turned into three hours and four fillings.  I was assuming she would reemerge sometime in the next two days with a half robot mouth and a bill that would require one of us to sell a organ on the black market.

Just as I was envisioning what it would be like to makeout with Robowoman, Sally came skipping out of the office with a big smile on her face.  It turns out the specialist wasn’t going to do the ‘smash and grab’ I expected.  To my surprise, she was the first Thai we met who didn’t want to take any of our money.  It was her professional opinion that Sally didn’t need anything done with her teeth at the moment.  The entire experience felt like a T.V. episode.  The main characters faced conflict, learned a valuable lesson, and everything was wrapped up neatly within an hour!