What does a sneeze smell like?

When I sneeze it smells like honey. 
What's up with that?

At first I thought it was the face masks I wear at work when I'm sterilizing the equipment. Like, maybe the masks are scented, but only when wet as some kind of safety thing, you know, so when your mask gets fluid on it that could possibly be contaminated? Makes sense, right?

But then we did experiments at work...somebody (I can't remember who it was!) helped me do all kinds of tests: spitting and pouring water on the masks. Nothing...except for the next time I'd sneeze into one. (I know it's weird, but after four years I'm bound to sneeze while wearing a mask more than once.)

What brought this up? Well I just sneezed...and there was a definite honey smell. Again. What is going on? Is it possible that there are tiny bees living in the back of my throat, making honey? Nose bees?

...

Well guess what guys, it's an actual thing. I just Googled it. Yeah, I did my research halfway through writing a post....ANYWAY it's actually called "honey sneeze". Shocker. It normally smells like honey, beeswax, pollen, baby powder, hay, or just "sweet". There are plenty of theories on why it happens...and it seems like it is actually pretty common. (And I thought I was crazy special.)

Here are some of the theories on why some people's sneezes smell like honey:
*note* Some of these don't make any sense. Also? I found these on the internet so take it all with a grain of salt.

-Sinus infection.
-Bacterias in your head tubes that smell...like honey.
-Bad breath/hallitosis.
-Mucus with similar chemical makeup to sugar.
-The atmosphere changes chemical makeup when you sneeze.
-Medicine you're taking.
-The sneeze clears out your nose and you can really get a good whiff of what your body smells like.
-Diabetes.
-It's your body's reward to you for letting a sneeze out, because if you hold them in you could cause an aneurysm.
-A ton of scary medical anomalies that don't even make sense but that's what happens when you look up any symptom or change in your body...suddenly you have cancer, AIDS and leprosy.
-It just does and nobody knows why.

...

I kind of like it. And now that I know that it's a thing, and not just my imagination, I can just sit back and enjoy the smell, post-sneeze. Although ever since that summer I worked on a honeybee farm, doing bee stuff and honey extraction, I actually really don't really care for the smell of honey...yuck.

The good news is that I have the best of the "scented sneeze" world. Apparently there are tons of people out there with bad smelling sneezes. And other people can smell them! (Get up close to me next time I sneeze, it's true!)

There are actually people out there who sneeze out the smell of:

-spiders
-musk
-dirt
-copper
-urine (!)
-bad breath
-old cheese
-a "rape field" (This is canola btw.)
-raked up leaves
-rotten teeth
-dead animals
-mold

Have any of you experienced this strange phenomenon? What do your sneezes smell like?

Danielle's Letter To The Blogosphere

Danielle writes one of my number one favorite blogs; Sometimes Sweet. In this post of hers, she really hits the nail on the head regarding what it is about blogging that keeps us all coming back. It's not all narcissism and confessions after all.

Anyway, I think it's a must read for bloggers and non-bloggers.

Enjoy, and you should follow her blog if you don't already, she's fantastic.

(image source: the damn post you should go read)

icy fountain

 I don't understand what the city I live in is thinking sometimes...aren't you supposed to um...not have fountains running when the weather is below freezing? Or am I crazy? Well anyway it makes for some beautiful pictures!

Ice makes everything pretty. :)

NEW YEAR, NEW DAY PLANNER

You know what I'm most excited for this New Year?

Using my new moleskine mini day planner. Yeah, I'm that kind of dork.

MINI PLANNERS from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

I have the cool green one. It's so teeny!

                              Images from here and here.

There's something so appealing about such tiny organization!

Cuba Chronicles #2 - Snorkeling

(unless otherwise credited, all photos were stolen from my sister, dad and step-mom)

One day in Cuba, we met a man on the beach who we paid to take us away from the resort.

The weather was supposed to be kind of chilly-ish and this guy told us he knew somewhere nicer he could take us where we could go snorkeling. We agreed to meet him on a street corner the next morning and go across the island.

The next day him and his son showed up at our meeting place at the agreed upon time in two rental cars, we got in, and went to Cardenas, their home town.

We were there to pick up snorkel gear from their house...and then they started making phone calls and doing something under the hood of one of the cars, and then both of them got underneath the jeep we were riding in.

Were we having car trouble? Getting set up for something? No. They were disconnecting the odometers so the rental place wouldn't charge them 35 cents per kilometer to drive us around. Smart/illegal!

We drove for around an hour and a half across the island, stopping midway for a beer and pee break.

Then we were at the Bay of Pigs. And we swam there.The son came in the water with us, and the dad stayed behind and watched our stuff, because there was another group of scuba divers nearby.


Beautiful, right?

I have to tell you guys, I am terrified of swimming in the ocean, especially deep water. You just don't know what's around you, and there's just too much space. I don't know...anyway I was kind of nervous. Even with these really super cool life jackets and everything.

We started swimming around and just as I was calming down, what did I practically run face first into? An entire cloud of jelly fish! NOOOO.

Image from here.

They were little white ones like this, maybe palm-sized or a bit larger, and there were a lot of them. I put my head out of the water, my step mom was nearby and this was our exact conversation:

"I think I see jellyfish"
"Me too!"
"Let's get outta here!"

We swam hard and fast until we couldn't see them anymore. Once in a while one would suddenly appear in front of me and I'd just yell into my snorkel tube and flail around until I got away from it, but they were few and far between after the initial cloud. Later we found out they were harmless; it's only the ones with the hangy tentacle things that can sting you, but we didn't know!

My sister brought an underwater camera...best thing ever. We swam around and saw pretty much any type of coral we had ever heard of, and beautiful fish, and clear clear water everywhere. Oh, and a sunken ship.  Serious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After like half an hour or forty five minutes everybody started running into too many jellyfish and panicking, so one by one we got out of the water. The guides packed us all up into the cars and we drove around ten minutes to our next destination. A cenote at Playa Giron, I think.

A cenote is an underwater cave. From above, it looks like a tiny little pond with some little fishies in it.

But get this: it's 80 fucking meters deep. Okay now swim in it about a black hole full of who knows what because it connects to the ocean somewhere down there. TERRIFYING. I was so scared that my teeth were chattering, but I played it as cool as I could and just swam around looking at the dark murky depths through my mask and sticking close to the edges where I could see some stuff, and thinking of the tv show Surface and trying not to totally panic. Here are a few photos taken in and around the cenote.

After the cenote we went back into the ocean and looked at more pretty coral and were surrounded by a school of really pretty striped fish in water barely deeper than our waists.

 

 

 

Then, our lovely guides drove us to their friend's house. She cooked us a crazy delicious dinner. She made lobster and ceviche for the meat eaters and I had all kinds of rice, salad and plantains. It was so good! There was even fresh-squeezed pineapple juice. 

 

Here's their Christmas tree!

And the scenery around their house.

It was an amazing day. By the time our guides got us back to the hotel it was night time. We paid them for our day and made plans for them to pick us up the next morning at the same spot, so they could take us to Havana! More on that later.

For now, here's a picture of me rocking out underwater. WOO!

DESATURATED SANTA

As you all probably know by now (because I've been telling you for ten freakin' days), I'm off jet-setting around North America (wait, is the Caribbean in North America? DAMN YOU GEOGRAPHY!), all willy-nilly. I'm going to try and respond to comments and visit your blogs as much as possible while I'm away but will be focusing on checking out my surroundings, hanging out with family, taking photos and loving life. 

If everything goes according to schedule I should be just waking up to the sound of my 
four youngest brothers and sisters freaking out about Christmas presents right about now, 
somewhere in the middle of the frozen prairies of central Canada.

Anyway, on to the scheduled post of the day!

--- 

Have you seen this costume? 

It's so fantastic I don't even know what to say except WOW!. 

Apparently she's a regular at the San Francisco SantaCon. 

And no, it's really really NOT photoshopped!

Here are some more views from around the internet. 

Photos taken by:   

Russel Daniels, The Burning Man Blog, Call Me E,  

Willivolt, Jeandiva, Jean Bauer, Tom Hilton, 

HlScotland Flickr page and are of BrodyQAT. 

Check out their flickr pages, they're all fantastic photographers

and I think they're not getting enough credit for these pics. 

For those of you who celebrate it, Merry Christmas! 

And get off the computer, it's time to hang out with your family.

Merry Chrizizzle

Found here.

Painting A Candy Cane Forest

Here's a pretty pretty painting to look at while I'm away. Enjoy!

Buy it here.