Crumbling teeth, hip pointer, wet rides; no worries

Phuong and I were eating chicken wings for lunch the other day when I bit on something that felt like glass. I spit out the white, porcelain-like material and thought it was bone. Make that ...hoped it was bone. Wrong. It was my front tooth. The material was enamel, or something like that. I have a bridge of four fake, front, top teeth. For 38 years or so the bridge gave me a Tom Cruise smile, or so I thought. Now I look like a minor league hockey player. My front teeth are falling apart, so I'm rolling the dice and having a Vietnamese dentist replace my bridge. The good news is that Phuong knows the dentist, and the dentist is a woman. I like Vietnamese women because they're direct and practical. The dentist is going to "fix me up"  later in October, so I hope to return to the United States in November looking like Tom Cruise again -- or no worse than Mr. Ed. Looks don't mean much at this stage of my life, but I want to be able to chew until Phuong puts me in the Dong Nai River.
September and October have been extremely rainy this year. It always rains as I'm leaving for work or traveling between assignments on a bike. Last week, storm Number 3 (the storms get numbers here) slammed into me while I was on the back of a bike going from my first class at a sneaker company to my second class at our home office. The rain and wind was so severe my driver stopped the bike. We waited a few minutes and the rain got more intense, flooding the streets because the drains are filled with litter. So we got back on the bike and sloshed our way to my second of three classes that night. The ride usually takes 20 to 30 minutes. That night it took 55 minutes because we had to detour to avoid flooding. I arrived soaking wet to class, 20 minutes late. My students looked at me like I was some guy with giant front teeth. They had no pity for the White Monkey even though my shoes squished when I walked. It was still raining when class finished, and I had to ride my bike to another site for my third class. Not a good night, but I got through. I woke up sick the next day, but Phuong made me soak my feet in warm salt water for half an hour. Son of a gun, I got better immediately and instantly resumed my cigarette smoking with no ill effects, other than the usual ill effects from cigarette smoking.
I took a nasty fall in tennis a week ago. Phuong hit the ball toward my man zone and I tried some fancy footwork to hit a winner at the net. I promptly fell on my right hip ... hard. Bone met hardcourt and hardcourt won that point. A lesser man, for example Hercules, would have stopped playing. I continued and won the title that day on one leg. The hip is slowly improving. My friend Ron diagnosed my injury -- from thousands of miles away during a skype chat -- as a hip pointer. I ice it after we play every day and all seems to be going fairly well other than an odd popping sound in my hip when I bend over. I've stopped bending over. Today, I charged the net on one point and Phuong hit the ball extremely hard and it went between my legs, missing the man zone by mere inches. We're still laughing and it's nine hours later. The match ended in a 6-6 tie, by the way.
Classes are very good, the students are very good, and Phuong is the greatest human being in the known universe. I can't wait to marry her. There's some work left to do for this to happen, but I'll save that for another blog. So this gap-toothed, hobbling White Monkey is quite content.