Texas - Day 57 - in Austin

Austin East KOA, Austin

Tuesday, 29 December 2020

I drove the 10 miles, which Google said would take 23 minutes, from the campground over to the Austin Center for Endodontics, only getting lost once.  Austin's changed a lot in just the 3 years I've been gone, and even when I lived here I'd get Manor Road mixed up with US 290, which is what I did this morning.  But I'd left the campground before 7:30 for a 9:00 appointment, just to be sure, so I got there in plenty of time.

I've never had a root canal before and heard terrible stories about pain.  But either Dr. Amin is unusually good, or they've come up with new techniques, because my pain level was pretty minimal.  It was a genuine nuisance (not to mention scary) to sit around with my mouth hanging open without a mask for a full hour, but after that I did what they told me and for the next 48 hours had nothing more solid than soft-boiled eggs and chicken noodle soup.

They explained that until I got a crown put on, I needed to be careful of the temporary filling they'd put in.  Which meant eating only on the other side of my mouth and not eating caramels or nuts.  Well, I don't do much with caramels these days, but for Christmas my family gave me 2 cans of cashews and a loaf of Collin St. Bakery Pecan Bread, so this instruction seemed on the level of torture.

After the appointment, I stopped at the Randalls Grocery in the same parking lot as the dentist office, and then went back to the campground.  I got filled up with propane and then settled down to convalescing, which turned out to be not so bad.  Only once did I feel like Tylenol would be useful, and that took care of the pain right away.

You know, driving across Austin as I've done these last 2 days, I couldn't help but notice a staggering number of homeless folks, with tents pitched at every highway overpass, it seemed like.  Austin's always seemed to have its share of homeless, but the number seems to have exploded and I wondered how much of that was due to the terrible economic problems that the virus has caused people.  

I looked it up online and learned that our empathetic governor has demanded that Austin criminalize homelessness here or he'd have the State of Texas do it.  Living in a capital city was good when I lived in Juneau (Alaska) and in Olympia (Washington), but it wasn't too positive here in the capital city of Texas, and I see that nothing's really changed.

Including growth.  Something else I couldn't miss besides the homeless were the multiple cranes all over town at various building projects.  For instance, the nursery my Momma patronized for decades is now in the history books, having been replaced by multi-story apartment buildings.  It happens.