One and Done #10

Hey. It’s One and Done Sunday.

Also, it’s Christmas.

One and Done Sunday is supposed to be nice and easy. One picture, and five links that are worth your time.

However, since I’ve been offline for like three weeks, I’ve only read two things and they’re not blogs. They’re articles that CC sent me links to, one with the email subject of “ewwwww” and the other with a subject of “EWWWWWWWWW!”.

The first is an article in Wired about how you can catch the Bubonic Plague from letting your dog sleep in your bed.

The second is an article on Yahoo connecting deaths from brain-eating amoeba to neti pot use with tap water.

The first year the kids lived with us I went on antibiotics five times for sinus & respiratory infections, including a bout with bronchitis that had me largely bedridden for a month with a fever that reached 104 degrees more than once. Then I found a great ENT and a neti pot. They changed my life.

My awesome ENT suggested that I use the pre-made saline solution and heat it in the microwave, rather than making it up with tap water and the salt packets. He said it would be more effective. That just seemed like extra steps to me, so I did not heed his advice and used hot tap water from the bathroom with the salt packets. After all, he said the pre-made solution was “more effective”. AT NO TIME did he mention the phrase, “brain-eating amoeba” in association with tap water. This seems to me a severe oversight on his part, and I may be reconsidering his awesomeness.

A word to doctors: if you want to get your patients’ attention, just use that phrase, “brain-eating amoeba”.

I’m sure the phrase, “flesh-eating bacteria” will have a similar effect.

As for the other links. . . uhhh. . . let’s see here. Well, Erin from Momfog is consistently kicking my ass on Words With Friends and she scored this one word on me that was worth 141 points. I was simultaneously impressed and humiliated. That has nothing to do with anything she posted but I like her blog. Oh, also, if you got a Kindle for Christmas, you should download Elena Aitken’s book Unexpected Gifts because it’s fun and sexy and every Kindle needs some o’ that.

If you wrote or read a post you want to share, put a link in the comments section below. Because I don’t really think that the Black Death and brain-eating amoeba are very festive links to put up at holiday time and my mom might get mad at me about that.

Here’s a slideshow of some pictures I took in the city this week.

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Because I’m posting from work.

One night I was putting #5 to bed and, as always, he was talking.

#5: Hey guess what.

Me: What.

#5: I know why all those great inventors weren’t very nice people to work for.

Huh. Not what I was expecting him to say. The statement begged a thousand questions but I asked only one. Well, more of a prompt than a question.

Me: Oh?

#5: Yeah, because they were so busy inventing things that they never got enough sleep.

I looked at him for a minute.

Me: Are you saying that because Daddy and I get cranky when we don’t get enough sleep?

#5: Yes.

And there you have it. This conversation came back to me recently because I’m halfway through serious-badass-Nikola Tesla’s biography by Margaret Cheney Man Out Of Time, and among all the many other mindblowing things I read, there was a bit about the AC/DC (the current, not the band) wars.

So you have your Thomas Edison, by anyone’s standard, a great inventor. He’s a proponent of Direct Current and is actively working to make it our country’s electrical standard. Then you have Tesla, kind of a whippersnapper by Edison’s standard, but a brilliant inventor except no one remembers who he is today because he was a terrible businessman and also didn’t get around to patenting most of his inventions. He saw the flaws in the DC system and developed a better, stable Alternating Current system. The war was on. Edison began a smear campaign to malign AC. Tesla couldn’t be bothered. He just kept inventing stuff and making his AC sexy.

I live in New Jersey, as did Edison. Edison, as part of his smear campaign, was paying school boys to kidnap puppies basically in my neighborhood, and then he would electrocute them with alternating current, to prove how dangerous it is. Not in secret, publicly. Because we’re both New Jersians, I believe I am not out of line when I call him a douchebag. I mean, thanks for the light dude, but. . . yeah.

I have to conclude, based on this conversation with #5 who gets his information from perhaps the same genius realm as Tesla or else bacon-and-video-game-induced trances, that Edison was seriously sleep deprived.

Hey, so Christine at Quasiagitato took one of my posts and we did a Mad Lib with it. It totally cracked me up and you should go look at it. I refrained from using “boobies” for every plural noun, even though I wanted to. Click here for her post.

Fiction Guest Post By #5.

I have a special treat today. #5 has agreed to do a guest post.

Me: I have a favor to ask you.

#5: What?

Me: Will you do a guest post on my blog?

#5: Mmm. Maybe. How much work do I have to do?

Me: Nothing. You did it already {I held up the story he had written}. You just have to say yes.

#5: Okay. Can I play on your iPad?

It’s a good story. Thrills, suspense, danger, bacon. Lots of monsters. We’re both quite proud of it.

On this day of giving thanks and counting blessings I always try to take a moment to remember maniacal and implicitly undead yet tasty breakfast meats . Enjoy!

One dark, dreary Halloween night, me Ethan, Hank, Brandon, Paton, and Chucky walked into a creepy haunted house in a cemetary with our candy. Giant black spiders were crawling everywhere. That completely explained why there was absolutely no girls there. A giant, greasy, delicious looking piece of bacon walked up and invited us in. We walked in terrified as a sharp, deadly blade shot out of the wall. I saved us all except for the bacon, because then I knew it was a trap. Grease was splurting out of the bacon.

As a prize for saving us from them, they let me eat it. I devoured the bacon. Everyone was amazed by how fast I ate it. It was terrific bacon, and the best bacon I have ever tasted. I started to wonder who made all of the bacon. We tried to run for our lives, but the huge, scary door slammed closed with a quick squeak before we had a chance to get out. We all screamed louder than we have ever screamed before.

We tried as hard as we could to open the huge, scary door. We were trapped!

We friendly tip-toed up the creepy, broken stairs. The stairs broke even more and squeaked every time we took a step. When we finally got to the top of the stairs, we tumbled straight into a trap door. We tried to jump out but it was way too high. Another problem of getting out, is there were scary bats everywhere. Then, big army ants came out and tried to kill us! The army ants ate my pants, but luckily Chucky had an extra pair incase I wet myself, which also happened. We ran trembling. We stopped at the corner. They almost killed us when a big, blood sucking vampire swooped by and flew us back out. He told us “The evil bacon is finally fighting back, and they going to eat all of you and me. After that, they are going to take over the world. They are go also going to eat me too because they called me a trader!” I asked, “who makes the bacon?” He said, “An evil devil!” The bacon heard us talk and came out and chased us. We all screamed, and ran for dear life.

We bounced trough the scary house screaming the whole entire time. A big, spooky ghost came out of the wall, but we rushed right through his stomach and he disapeared. A big, bloody zombie jumped out of a coffin. I got a hold of Eathan and was about to eat him when I noticed an ax was on the wall, and I chopped the zombie’s bloody arm off. The zombie was completely bleeding. We sadly all lost all of our candy in the spooky, deadly haunted house.

We almost got out, when we relized the evil, wanting victorious, deadly bacon was going to still take over the world and get their victory. So, we ripped out the sords and knives that we forgot about and used them agenst the bacon. We had the fight of our lives while stabbing, cutting, chopping and devouring all the bacon. The evil bacon sadly ate Paton and he was digested and never heared from again but the rest of us happily destroyed the evil and got out safe. We all had a party/funeral without a body. We all cheered for saving the world, but we were sad Paton got eaten. Luckly we were happy enough to wash the sadness away though.

The End.