Iowa Results & Dental Estimate

Thank heavens the Iowa caucuses are done and we can now get on with the further business of finding two nominees for November. I think the way Hillary Clinton won in Iowa says a great deal about the reliability (unreliability?) of the Iowa caucus procedure. The same way school children decide who gets to play with a toy first or how referees choose who gets the ball first on Super Bowl Sunday, some precincts in Iowa, with a coin toss, determined who they'd choose for the most powerful job in the world. Sanders and Clinton ran in a dead heat throughout the state and in cases where there was a tie, the decision was left up to chance. A coin toss. Yeah, that says a lot about the intelligence of Iowans and their presidential nominating system. On the other hand, the fact that Cruz beat Trump says they’re not all that dumb after all.

I recently found out the hard way about dental procedures and the costs thereof. I wanted to find a better solution for my upper and lower dental plates, like permanently fixed instead of removable. Well, I went to my dentist to hear what it would all entail and spoke with him for half an hour. Then, after all my questions were answered, I finally got an estimate on what it would all cost. Gulp! My highest assumptions were off by over 400%. Where I was willing to go as high as $15,000, the number they gave me was just over $64,000. I told him I’d have to go home to discuss it with my wife. Discussion. Yeah. This was a non-discussable decision. I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t, that I’d taught high school English for thirty-five years and that if I taught another year at the highest salary on the scale, I’d have to teach one full year to pay for my new mouth. I also wanted to tell him, but I didn’t, that it would be like buying a 2016 Mercedes-Benz GL and then a few years down the road driving it off a cliff. Without insurance. How in the world can this kind of dental work cost that much? How in the world could or would any senior here agree to such a fee? Anyone who would must be far richer than we are. So, I guess I’ll just get along with what I have for as long as I have left. Now, each time we go out for dinner, I’ll think about the many times we can dine out and not come even close to spending that $64,000. I’d need to live another twenty years to gobble up that much dining-out food. And in that twentieth year I’d be too old to chew or even know what it was I wasn’t able to chew or even remember the next day what I’d tried to chew and was unable to chew.