Happy birthday, Lysana.

The bosses are out of town on a meeting and I can finally get some work done without being hounded or criticized.

Dumb question: I paid for some work on my house well over a year ago. The check has still not been cashed. I'm assuming that means that it cannot be cashed at this point, correct?

I wouldn't count on it, even if your bank tells you no. IME, banks are a lot less rigorous about following their own rules than you might desire. I'd check with the recipient first, and cancel the check if you can't find anything out.

Happy Birthday, Lysana!

Breaktime. Must get much done.

For some reason, I have woken up (waked up?) at 3 am for two nights in a row.

I am very tired and I think I'm coming down with a cold.

I slept well last night for a change...apparently rain on the roof knocks me out pretty much. Which makes it either good or bad that I'm a desert dweller, I'm not sure. Should have somebody make a rain tape for rough nights. How does ND know what wombat urine tastes like?

Speaking of urine:

Love Potion No. 9?
If research out of Duke University is any indication, the scent of a man's urine is enough to make a woman salivate. Researchers discovered a distinctive male smell, produced by a chemical called MTMT, in the urine of male mice. The chemical isn't produced by female mice, and the ladies strongly preferred sniffing male urine over female urine or urine from castrated males, which does not contain the chemical compound. "MTMT seems likely to advertise the presence of a male from a distance, either as a signal to other males or to attract females," write the researchers. The discovery suggests that sex-specific chemicals are also at play in humans.

Okay, eww.

That's gross. (And honestly, the alure of smelly unisex restrooms has always escaped me.)

Anne, I agree you should call the recipient to figure out what's up.

Also, timelies.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that doesn't work on any woman who's shared a bathroom with a man.

Holy shit, you guys. Big!Boss has Strep Type A necrotizing fasciitis.

That's right -- for real, he's infected with flesh-eating bacteria. He's "lucky" in that it only seems to have whammied one arm, and nowhere else. However, he had to have all the skin removed from the underside of his left arm, from the wrist all the way up to the armpit.

The bacteria are in his blood, but not his organs. However, his organs are rebelling just from the trauma of the infection/skin removal/etc, so he has to undergo dialysis for a couple hours each day. He's on high doses of IV antibiotics and high doses of painkillers and he's on a ventilator, so he's not technically in a drug-induced coma, but he might as well be.

He's going to be in the hospital for a long time. He's 73. The good part of all this is that he should have died, because the first 12-24 hours of Strep A infection is the window where people most commonly die. (And from what I understand, it was 36-48 hours before he went to the ER.)

So since he survived the initial 12-24 hours, he has a good long-term prognosis. However, he's got a long road in front of him, and he *is* 73 -- the infection and having all that skin removed is very very hard on his system. And it'll be a while before he can have surgery to graft skin onto his arm, so having a skinless arm (yes, it's wrapped in saline-soaked gauze -- they treat it like a severe burn) for a period of time is going to put a lot of stress on his body. Still, he should pull through, eventually.

Shit, man. Flesh-eating bacteria.