To Cayman and back

To continue on recapping all that has happened in the past it was exactly one year ago to this date I was in Cayman.

There is much I can write about the two weeks I spent on the island of Grand Cayman but I will try to keep it light. I stayed in a hotel close to their famous "7 Mile Beach" just North of the capital Georgetown. Being a Jamaican and all I was never impressed when I heard Caymanians speak of this place seeing as how we have our own 7 mile beach in Negril at home but I must humbly say that we do not compare come close to the quality of their fluffy white sands or the views of spectacular beach front property along the 7 mile stretch.

Now with all of my free time after work, I took it upon myself to make several treks up and down this beach. I learned a few lessons which I shall share with you today.

1. Take into consideration the walk back if you spend hours casually walking on the beach in one direction away from your hotel. One night after sunset I ended up and the south end of the beach and looked back, the hotel was nowhere in sight. I made my way off the beach back to the main road(which may not be as scenic but much easier to walk on than sand) and had to endure the long and tedious walk back.
2. Everyday is a beach day. It didn't matter if it was a work day or Sunday. The beach was littered with people both local and tourists, there was families with a picnic, beach volley baller and water sports. There was always a lot of activity.
3. On the matter of locals and tourists it was very hard to tell them apart. The motto for Jamaica is "Out of many one people" but I need to submit to the relevant authorities to have that motto transferred to Cayman. Cayman is one big mixing pot of people from all over the world, some permanent some transient. My guess is being a tax haven for big business adds a constant slew of expats to the population.

There is much more to say about my stay there but somehow I am not seeing the pictures on my laptop so I will have to continue when I can find them.

R and R

It is late and I do not particularly feel like thinking so I shall not be recapping any of the bulleted points of what I did over the last two years but I will leave you with the photo of the oh so lovely Kingston harbor below(you can thank me later for cropping out the floating debris with my mad gimp skills).

I don't know about y'all but I'm going to the beach this weekend. It is the same old story, I work standby a lot of the times but this weekend I am off so lots of sunshine and white sand for me. I was supposed to go with a friend but it seems as if she has bailed on me, or is dead in a ditch somewhere. Whatever the case may be she has not answered my txt messages nor calls today so yeah it will be just me soaking up the sun. I used to think it was a bit odd to go to the beach by yourself but, eff that, I need some down time so I'll be burnt a crispy brown on my back as I spend the hours snorkeling our local reefs.

What will you be doing this weekend?

Loosing teeth

As I mentioned before, I lost some of my wisdom in my fist surgery ever. My dentist had been trying to get me to remove all four of my wisdom teeth and I have been putting it off as I was not into throwing my money at some monster who wants to inflict pain on me. That being the case I stuck his referral to the dental surgeon on my fridge and it sat their for years getting tattered.

I had a condition, two of them were impacted, the bottom pair were growing sideways and pushing against their sole neighbours. Based on the diagram above they were in the state of the teeth in the top left quad, 'angular'. Whatever the case or state was I went through a painful episode where the flap of gum over the teeth became inflamed and the top wisdom teeth that erupted fine were actually biting down on the gum. This was not a nice feeling so when it occurred a second time a couple of months after it was time for them to go.

Now I am not sure how much of a coincidence this is but my last regular blog post was on August 27, 2010 at 3am and because I keep such good records at 11am that same day I did the surgery. Apparently I did it at the end of my vacation, silly me I should have filed for some sick days to do this. Anyway I'm sure I could go into a lot of detail of the procedure like the surgeon sticking my jaw bone with anesthetic(the needle was actually stuck in the bone) or one of my teeth shattering as he pried it out with his mid evil pliers from under the gum but I wont. I will leave you with my attempts of recording the end result of what was left after the extraction.

Thanks to my lack of photography skills a picture is not worth a thousand words. What you are not seeing on the leftmost photo is the blood and tissue that remained after the tooth was ripped from my jaw bone. After all of the cutting, sawing and ripping I had to get stitches on both sides of my mouth. The nurse failed to tell me how traumatic(to my flesh) it would have been when she asked if I was only doing one side or both, If I only knew then just maybe I wouldn't have given her a sarcastic response of both.

The procedure was the easy part, it was the recovery period that was torture. Now due to this doctors careless stitching I was unable to bite down and close my jaws completely so there goes any hope of eating solid foods. My face was swollen, I couldn't talk and I was in serious pain. That week my meals consisted of things I could swallow with ease: ice cream, mashed potato, soup and bullybeef. It wasn't until a full seven days later when they removed the thread from the stitches that I could properly bite down and actually eat again.

I snatched this xray exposure from my dentist the following year, it shows where the wisdom tooth should have been, the bottom right corner, and it also shows that the top wisdom tooth(also marked for removal) growing without restriction into that gap. Luckily for me since the top teeth have erupted and are going straight my regular dentist can remove them without any need for blood and gore. Also note all of my fillings :( yes I guess I had poor dental hygiene when I was little, where were my parents, I got all of those fillings when I was in prep school.

Anyway later for now, cya probably next week if I keep this up.

So what have you been up to?

Well I must apologize for being noticeably absent from this page but I had good reason, I'll get into that in a later post. This is just an update of a few of things I consider note worthy that occurred in the past 19 or so months of this blackout. It may be out of order but I'll try my best.

• Zoe, my daughter for those of you who don't know, turned one!
• I lost a bit of wisdom with my first surgery ever.
• I get hammered with school work as my group members all fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. This was probably one of the main reasons for my absence.
• I opted for another surgery and lost a different piece of me.
• I worked out of Cayman for two weeks. Great experience!
• I had my first accident with the Jimny. :( Thankfully it wasn't my fault though.
• I finished school, yay! I can now add MSc. to my credentials. I now have free time to burn.
• I created two tumblr pages, never really figured out how to use it though. Is it like twitter? coz I dont really get twitter either.
• Zoe turned two! No major incidents, I must be doing something right.
• I upgraded my computer to a quad core beast(lol not really a beast but much faster than my old single core pc) in preparation to do video editing and vlogging. Who was I fooling, I can't vlog, I can't even get regular blogging right.

Well that is it for my update summary, I plan on expanding on most of these in the upcoming weeks as it seems as if I have breathing space at work once more.