Giving thanks for friends, puppies, floating, and pie

Wow. It’s been a really long week, but the weekend is just about here.

I saw the notice on the WordPress blog about the “Giving Thanks” contest earlier this week and knew that it was just the right kick-in-the-pants to get me to try out the MiniDV camera that I recently purchased on eBay. So I grabbed a few of my friends, asked them what they’re thankful for, and cut it all together into a short video. Thirty seconds isn’t that much time, especially when your friends are so voluble!

I wasn’t really sure how this film would turn out. I shot a lot of footage, but as I only had 30 seconds for the final cut I had to really pare things down to make sure that I could include a clip of each person.

Filming each person was fun. Pure and simple. Each person had their own unique quirks and mannerisms that really came out when they were put in front of a camera lens. Percy with the sheep, Alex with a ping pong ball, and a highly-caffeinated Nida all presented unique challenges when filming (such as keeping the subject in frame!) and offered not only different answers to “For what are you thankful?”, but even took different approaches to answering the questions.

Okay, enough chatter from me. Here’s the meat of this post, the video:

H1N1: How we test for it and why there’s no FDA-cleared test

Oink, oink. Yes, one of those ILIs has caught up with me and I’m currently stuck in bed sipping water and battling a fever that makes me wonder if I could fry eggs on my forehead.

The CDC has some nifty graphs and tables on their website. You can learn about everything from the number of illnesses reported by US region to Antiviral resistance. In case you thought that H1N1 was some kind of trumped-up wimp on the block, note that

all 2009 H1N1 viruses tested since April 2009 have been resistant to the adamantanes (amantadine and rimantadine).

Oh great, just what we need: more superbugs!