We went to the dentist. My husband doesn’t like shots, including shots in his mouth, so he was pretty reluctant to go. He said a dentist had told him years ago that his saliva is very basic, so he should never have problems with cavities.

Still, I made him go, and this is what we learned:

• It’s good to have a checkup earlier than 3 years after major oral surgery (such as getting wisdom teeth removed) because, apparently, infections don’t always leave you writhing in agony. They can be quiet little things that cause minor annoyances for no reason every now and then.
• Even if you’re like my husband and will never have a cavity in your life, you can have other problems–like excessive tartar buildup.
• Excessive tartar buildup leads to gum disease.
• People develop tartar differently.
• Alex develops tarter very quickly and needs his teeth cleaned every 6 months.
• With lots of tartar buildup, flossing only counts if you do it 2-3 times a week. Anything less, and you might as well not bother.
• When you floss, you need to scrub the sides of the teeth and get down below the gumline. And especially floss the backs of your back teeth.
• Bleeding during flossing is normal for gums. I know this, because the dental hygienists made our gums bleed a lot and kept poking us with sharp things, and they knew what they were doing. (And Alex asked.)
• Soft and extra-soft toothbrushes are better than medium and hard brushes because the bristles are flexible enough to clean under your gums.
• When brushing, scrub the biting surface of your back teeth but don’t scrub the sides. Instead, angle the toothbrush and make small circles at the gums, then move the brush to another tooth and do the same, all the way around, on both sides. (video) Electric brushes with round heads are useful for this (though neither better nor worse than manual ones, if used properly) — just place the rotating brush against your gums for a few seconds on each side of each tooth.
• The most neglected teeth are in the back and touch the tongue. Everyone does a good job in the front where they can see, but the ones in the back tend to get a half-hearted job and cause more problems down the road.

I picked up Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause in middle school, around the same time I picked up the Night World series by LJ Smith. I prefered Smith’s stories, but Klause stuck in my mind due to solid writing and a moment when my brother thought I was silly for being embarrassed at the word “kiss” in the title.

A friend recently suggested Klause to me, and I’d been meaning to catch up on my supernatural teen book obsession — especially because this one agent website ordered writers to keep up with what’s happening in their genre — but I couldn’t remember being wowed by Silver Kiss and wanted to save my free time for writing.

Still, my husband decided we were overdue for a library raid and all the Young Adult books seemed to have been returned that morning because the shelves were glutted. I saw Blood and Chocolate, which hadn’t been in since we moved here, so I sighed, picked it up, and stacked it onto my five others, figuring “I’ve avoided it long enough.”

Since the protagonist is a werewolf with dating issues, and since the title is “blood” and “chocolate” I expected violence (blood) and sex (chocolate). This is part of why I waited so long to read it — I’m not an “intense” sort of girl, and this promised lots of gloopy emotional messiness.

I was pleased, though, because the gloopy emotional messiness was pretty engaging. There’s a lot of making out, nudity, violence, and talk about sex, but the overall premise is solid (a werewolf girl feels like she doesn’t fit in with her disorderly pack, so she takes a shot at making human friends) and I appreciated the ending as rock-solid. I also appreciate Klause as a writer who can make me cheer for characters I didn’t like at first, which I always love in a book.

So I approve. I’d put an age minimum of 16 or 17 on this due to content, but I enjoyed it. Gonna rent the movie — I’m excited to see how they translated the book to film. It should be fun.

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