Wonderful news!

Dentist today and two screws were loose on my lower implants. The implants themselves are fine. New lease on life here! So I immediately abandoned my soft diet after the dentist tightened the screws. I figure it's healthy to eat crunchy foods. Like muscles, if you don't use them you lose them. But I am going to exercise good sense too. No more abuse. Don't know why they got loose. In the last 25 years I had a screw come loose on my upper implants but don't remember the details anymore. The dentist said that's just sometimes the nature of screws.

He really tightened them tight.* I thought for sure he'd twist the implants right out of my jaw. So glad that's over!

Working on my plant guide still..... and for months to come. Dr Powell looked at the Winterfat specimen my sister took him today and declared it's Texas Shrub (Iresine leptoclada), not winterfat. (See Dec. 4th post for photos.) Quite a surprise!

Coming back from Odessa today I noticed the landscape in the oil fields was dotted with blazing flares of natural gas. Such a waste of the earth's resources, not to mention it just adds toxins to the air. I hate to see that. Hugh says it's cheaper for them to pay the fines for burning it than to ship it to market. Never mind the environment. Here's a photo I snapped with my phone as we were whizzing by.

When I got my Rio Grande Electric Co-op 2019 calendar I saw a photo of an awesome ruin I had never seen before. I thought I had seen every interesting structure in the Big Bend. So I contacted the co-op and they directed me to this website -- http://www.cfranch.com/ 

Seems it was built as a movie set for "Dead Man's Walk" and has had various videos shot there since then. It's on a private ranch whose owner is a millionaire, probably billionaire. If he doesn't want to share it with the public, I wish he'd at least maintain it.

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* UPDATE: Several years later I learned from an implant expert dentist that tightening those two screws too tight was the only reason those two implants could possibly have broken as they did. That ended up costing $20,000 and 8 months of torture.....