A Somewhat Unusual Christmas Celebration

My Christmas morning started off how I’d imagine most households would begin their Christmas celebrations.  One by one my family got out of bed, wished each other a merry Christmas, had breakfast, and exchanged gifts.  We began the preparations for Christmas lunch and awaited the arrival of my grandparents.

It was after lunch that things started to get a bit weird.  My brother had been rummaging in our Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs and emerged with a strange horn-like device.

The device was one half of a set of ping-pong ball poppers, which are designed to fire a ping-pong ball at an alarming speed. 

My brother, clearly intrigued by the device, proceeded to test its limits.    

He soon concluded that it was indeed too dangerous to be fired randomly around the house. 

He re-entered the cupboard, and a moment later reappeared holding the most unusual object I have ever seen.



This gigantic, hollow, chicken-shaped object used to be a cat bed, judging by the amount of cat fur found inside it.

My brother’s game now involved attempting to launch the ping-pong balls into the chicken’s mouth. 

It was highly amusing, but soon became too easy.   My brother disappeared once more into the cupboard to find the second ping-pong popper.  The second popper was given to my Dad, and the challenge became to fire the ping-pong ball to each other and catch it in the popper.  My brother (for reasons unknown to the rest of us) wore the chicken cat-bed as a hat.

It didn’t take long for this to turn from a two player game into a whole family effort.  My grandparents, and even my mum (who I always thought was the most normal one in the family), took turns at blasting ping-pong balls at each other.

At one point during the ruckus, I stopped to wonder if this was how other families celebrated Christmas. 

Whether it involved chicken cat-beds or not, I hope you all had a fantastic holiday.

Merry Christmas!

I love Christmas! I'm like a super excited four year old at Christmas time.  Here, I got you a present.

You're welcome.  I hope you like it. I put a lot of thought into it.

I hope you have a fantastic Christmas!

Scrooge McDuck turned hay fever into Special Agent Gibbs

Right now I’m between jobs.  Technically I suppose that makes me unemployed, but I prefer ‘between jobs’. It sounds less... hopeless. 

This means I no longer have the joy of a regular income, and my money spending habits are beginning to look a lot like that of Scrooge McDuck.  If I can’t justify that I absolutely NEED something, I won’t buy it.

So despite the fact that at this time of year I suffer mercilessly from hay fever, I have refused to spend my last few dollars on antihistamines.  I figured if I could just avoid nature until the hay fever season was finished, I wouldn’t need to waste my precious money.

It turns out it’s not that easy.  Hay fever is to me what Special Agent Gibbs is to murderers on NCIS.  It doesn’t matter how hard I try to hide, hay fever will hunt me down and punish me.

My untreated hay fever was so bad that my airways became blocked and I stopped being able to breathe properly.  Reluctantly, I made an appointment to go see the doctor, who informed me that my hay fever had evolved into a sinus infection, and prescribed me various medications to treat it.  The total cost of the appointment plus the medications added up to a lot more than the price of a packet of antihistamines.

Ask me the definition of irony.  I’ve got the perfect example.

Among the collection of medication were some tiny pink pills, which I was informed were steroids.  Apparently, steroids can be used to help open up your air passages.

Here are the things that I knew about steroids before I had to take them:

1.      They’re banned in professional sporting competitions.

2.      They make you buff.

3.      They can cause something called ‘moon face’.

Here is what I learnt about steroids after I started taking them:

1. They provide you with unlimited, constant, unrelenting energy.

I discovered the effects of steroids at about 2AM after my third dosage.  Despite only having been asleep for about two hours, I was suddenly awake and full of life.  I wanted to get up and do things. I wanted to run. I wanted to yell. I wanted to hit things.

Knowing that it was 2AM, that I had only had two hours of sleep, and that my house echoes so badly that any kind of movement, especially running, yelling, and hitting, would be sure to wake my sleeping flatmates, I tried to force myself to go back to sleep.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

After counting sheep for an eternity, I finally managed to fall back asleep just as it was beginning to get light.

Later in the morning I awoke with the same intense levels of energy that had woken me during the night. It was like my veins were filled with liquid energy. I leapt out of bed and decided to go mow the lawns.

Generally, mowing the lawns is the kind of job that would exhaust me, leaving me crumpled in a heap of uselessness for the rest of the day.  But not today. Today the lawn mower had a hard time keeping up with me.

After mowing the lawns had failed to make even a dent in my excess of energy, I decided to pack up some of my things. I’m moving house, so I have slowly begun to pack away my life into cardboard boxes. Usually I find this job exceedingly boring and my level of enthusiasm matches that, but today my stuff was being packed so fast it was as though I had four arms.

When all that could be packed was packed, I was still finding it hard to sit still. I didn’t seem to be capable of doing nothing.

 I decided to clean the kitchen.  I did such a thorough job I don’t think the kitchen knew what had hit it.  I even pulled the things out of the cupboards and cleaned inside them.  By the time I had finished everything sparkled so brightly it hurt to look at it.

Having run out of things to do around the house, I tried to partake in one of my favourite activities: mindlessly surfing the internet.  The problem was I was still having trouble sitting still, so instead I ended up trying to see how fast I could type.  It turns out I can type really fast, as long as I don’t want to use actual words.

Towards the end of the day I finally started to calm down a little.  I was able to sit down to eat my dinner, and even managed to concentrate on one thing long enough to watch TV for a bit.

At about 10.30 I decided to go to bed. I climbed in under my duvet and discovered that I wasn’t the slightest bit tired.  I decided to read my book until I was tired enough to sleep.

I was reading until after 1AM.

Seven disgusting facts about cockroaches

I am terrified of cockroaches. They seriously gross me out. It’s something about the way their antenna wiggle about, and that scuttely noise they make when they move.   Plus there’s something unnatural about a creature that can survive for a week without a head.

Yes that’s right, cockroaches can live for up to a week without a head.  Fact number one.  Their brains are not stored in their head; instead a cockroach’s brain is scattered throughout its body.  The headless cockroach will eventually die from dehydration. 

Fact number two.  There are over 4,500 different species of cockroaches.  Some of these species have been traced back over 200 million years. That’s 200 million years worth of freaky antenna waving and creepy scuttleing noises.

Number three. Cockroaches leave chemical traces in their poop which attracts other cockroaches.  So if you find one cockroach in your house, then you know that there’s got to be others.  That one cockroach you just found has been graffiti-ing your house with faecal invitations to all its mates.

Here’s a fact that I know you’ll find interesting.  Female cockroaches only need to mate once in order to lay eggs for the rest of their lives.  It may be because I am exceedingly immature, but I can’t hear this fact without thinking up sleazy cockroach pick-up lines.

Some more disgusting facts. Cockroaches can hold their breath for forty minutes.  They shed their skeleton instead of their skin, and they have a second set of teeth located in their digestive systems which helps them to digest food.

A cockroach could out-survive you in almost any situation.  If you’re not afraid of them, you should be.

Google, you have let me down

As an experiment, I decided to Google One Nerdy Sheep to see whether Google had acknowledged my presence on the internet yet.

Apprehensively, I typed One Nerdy Sheep into the search bar.

These are the results my search produced.

The definition of Nerd Rape and a video of a man acting inappropriately towards a sheep are deemed by Google to be the most relevant sites of interest for someone searching ‘One Nerdy Sheep’. What is wrong with the world?!

Now I’m scared people will associate me with these sites. Why did I not research this before I chose it as my blog name?!

Ok, I think I know how to fix this.

Disclaimer:

One Nerdy Sheep hereby declares that we are not in support of Nerd Rape or interspecies relations.  If you came to this site looking for these things, you are in the wrong place.  And you probably need psychological help.