WaterPik

Per my dentist’s instruction, I finally bought a Teledyne WaterPik ($45 in lieu of $$$ wisdom teeth extraction). Actually, I bought it about a month ago, but I tried it for the first time last night. There are several things of note that should have been included in the instruction manual:
1) One should not bare one’s teeth as one would when brushing them. This causes the impinging water/rinse/wash stream to be immediately redirected to the bathroom mirror, wall, shower curtain, counter top, and into one’s eyes. (Listerene in the eyes feels about like what you’d expect.)
1.a) Caveat: While closing one’s mouth keeps the collateral damage to a minimum, it’s surprising how quickly this thing can fill up one’s mouth. While the logical solution would be to remove the waterpik in a panicked gasp for air, it is important to note that this may cause an arc of high-pressure mouthwash to be drawn directly across one’s shirt and/or face.
1.b) Solution: Simulate continuous vomiting. (That’s simulate, not stimulate.) That is, let the water/wash/saliva mixture drain constantly from the mouth (held directly over the sink), achieving a sort of inelegant equilibrium.
2) Avoid directing the stream into the back of the throat. The force of it will cause the rinse to be forced up into the eustacian tubes, resulting in the sensation that one would expect from snorting listerene.
And finally:
3) The washing device does not actually have a pressure-actuated check valve in it. So one should avoid placing it in a precarious position on the countertop for the reason that if it should fall off and be left hanging by the connecting tubing, it will quickly siphon all of the mouthwash out of the waterpik reservoir onto the bathroom floor. The upside of this being that my bathroom floor is now cavity-free and smells much better.

Downtime

Oops. My router froze up the other day… which meant that when I restarted it, my server had a new IP address on the local network, and the router had a new IP address from the cablemodem. So… everything was hosed. Had to use quite a bit of my hostmaster training from my job at the U to track down and fix all the DNS issues that popped up from it, but I got everything squared away yesterday. I really need to make the IP address of the server static in the house, but unfortunately, there is no way to make sure that my router keeps the same IP address from Comcast other than never rebooting it.