Wednesday Walk

Apart from feeling like someone gave me a friendly punch in the jaw, I am doing very well after yesterday's trials.

... so after we got up this morning, we went to the closest supermarket to pick up something for a late breakfast/early lunch. Like it had been predicted, it had been snowing during the night and there is about 15 cm of snow on the ground. Not much of a snowcalypse, but here it is still considered extreme, and for the most part cars stood still and people stayed at home. Many shops and apparently all schools were closed.

We bought two containers of hot, ready-made soup, and after eating and spending another hour at home, we decided to go explore the snowed-down city. We brought the camera. Clearly we were not the only ones with that idea -- everywhere we saw amazed photographers trawling the town. It was strange seeing this (for us) ordinary winter weather being treated as (depending on your angle) a beautiful wonder or a near-catastrophe. That being said, we didn't see panicked people, crashed cars or anything else worthy of alarm, so it seems Tacoma is handling the snow just fine.

A few pictures from the walk, continued in the next entry because of space limitation.

Snowmageddon

'If you don't have to go out, don't'

"A snowstorm expected to dump 5 to 10 inches on Pierce County today has started and is expected to settle in for the day with steady snowfall sure to paralyze roadways and keep commuters home."

I'm not sure if they mean it this time

Seattle Weather: January 2012 Snowstorm Could Be Worst Blizzard In Decades

Dentist

The night before yesterday I woke up at 4 am with a really bad toothache.

The pain had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. I tried to go back to sleep, but after an hour or so of writhing around, I decided to get up and take a painkiller. That seemed to help, and I eventually fell asleep again.

Yesterday, Thorsten and I woke up late for once (we usually get up around 8 or 9 -- impressive considering we usually don't have any commitments), and my tooth was a lot better. Soon after breakfast, however, it started hurting badly again. Again I tried with an Ibuprohen, and again it seemed to do the trick.

We decided to go for a walk in the park. It was Martin Luther King Day, so many families, couples, joggers and solitary strollers had found their way to the snowy park, which was bustling with life.

By the time we came home and started preparing dinner, the pain had started again -- and this time it was even more ferocious. I could barely stand it and found myself pacing the apartment agitatedly every time a new wave of pain hit me (luckily, it would stop now and then). I realized that the problem wasn't going to go away on its own, and we started googling around to see where we'd find a dentist. The painkillers -- Ibuprophen and Aspirin -- had stopped having an effect.

Evening came, we finally went to bed. What felt like knives jabbing at my jaw kept me awake until 4 am. Lacking any other options, I tried some more painkillers. Again, they didn't seem to have an effect.

So when we got up this morning and the pain wasn't any better, we knew what had to be done. After a shower and a small breakfast, we headed for the closest dentist. Thanks to the "crazy weather" (5 cm of feeble, melting snow), a lot of people had cancelled their appointments at the clinic, and I could get in immediately. We were told a check-up would cost around $130, and didn't have a problem with that. To my great relief, I was given a shot of anaesthetics almost immediately after being x-rayed.

Turns out that I had a cracked, dead tooth with a festering, inflamed nerve that was causing a lot of pressure -- and hence, pain.

Long story short -- I spent my afternoon at that clinic. I had an (amazingly pain-free) root canal done by two extremely friendly young women, and we left a flabbergasting $2.500 poorer. All in all, an authentically American experience.

Squirrel

The squirrels in the nearby park are extremely used to humans. Someone must have been feeding them despite the signs strictly forbidding anyone to do so.

We're guilty of once feeding them grapes on our way home from the supermarket that lies some 500 m from here.

Thorsten managed to film one of the little critters the other day.

Winter

This first picture shows the view of our apartment building, Park Towers. As the name reveals, it is right next to a small, but charming park -- Wright park. Thorsten went on a walk this Sunday, and took the two pictures that depict the park.

Finally, two more pictures that shows the snowy view from our window Sunday afternoon.

Our apartment is on the tenth floor in one of Tacoma's less scary neighbourhood. We were warned about the weather in the North-East, but so far we've mostly been lucky. It felt like spring up until Sunday this week, when it suddenly started snowing. Now it's starting to seem like winter.

A few pictures that shows the view from our window: