7 Quick Takes Friday Part II

Check out 7 Quick Takes Friday over at Conversion Diary! Here are mine:

1. Suellen, Carreen, and I each have a Betta fish, and because we're all home right now, their bowls are all sharing a shelf in the living room. Mine is named Grover Cleveland; Suellen's is Buddy, and Carreen's is Osi, after Osi Umenyiora, Giants' Defensive End. Mom says you can tell a lot about us based on our fish names.

2. No school, no work, home sick with a terrible cold, not interacting with the world at large this week. I find myself stuck for Quick Takes.

3. My sister Suellen came home from her apartment in the city because she was sick and threw up, and wanted to be home. This is the most foreign thing in the world to me. When I'm sick, I don't like anyone near me at all. I don't like people asking how I am, how I feel, what I need, and bugging me to eat and drink. I don't want to be taken care of. I can't be nice to people when I'm sick, I don't want to try to be nice to people when I'm sick, and being around people includes an unfortunate imperative to treat them like human beings. To a sick me, leaving an empty apartment to come home to a full house would be pure torture.

4. We've been keeping track. Now that Suellen's home, and sick, this house has seen 4 sick people, with 4 different illnesses, 4 different sets of germs over the past week. 3 of us are still sick. What an inauspicious start to the New Year.

5. Do you ever think about outer space? If it's never-ending, how can it be expanding? My head might explode.

6. Have you seen the commercials for the Creosote Sweeping Log? How they talk about fireplaces causing fires? It reminds me of how my grandparents' house caught fire, about 5 years ago. I have no clue if creosote was involved, but the chimney caught fire in the middle of the night, while my grandparents, their tenant, and my aunt and uncle and my 3 cousins were asleep. Their smoke detectors had no batteries. It was very nearly a huge tragedy. My grandfather - who doesn't hear well, doesn't see well, and doesn't smell well - was the one who was awaken by it in the middle of the night. He says he tasted it. That is not a reliable way to detect fires, so just make sure you've all got working smoke detectors!

7. Genealogy has a way of turning people morbid. Nothing has as much power to excite me these days as receiving the death certificate of an ancestor in the mail. I bug people to recall their grandparents' funerals so they can give me dates, so I can look up records. I sound way too happy when I tell people about my great-grandfather's sisters who died as children. These are some of my favorite things to talk about.