"I Don't Have An Eating Disorder. Honest!"

Somewhere out there, an eating disorder counselor is still not entirely convinced the caller on the other end of the phone is not in denial. It literally took me five minutes of stating the call was for research purposes; I enjoyed food waaaayyy too much to ever starve myself, much less regurgitate it willingly, to ever have an eating disorder. She finally sighed and agreed to answer my questions.

I'm not fully convinced she knew all the facts; I had spoken to several teens about the subject, who informed me there was a hybrid disorder at their school: Some days their friends wouldn't eat anything; three days later they were binging and purging. When I brought this up, the counselor insisted that would never happen. An anorexic would never binge; a bulimic would never go for days without eating.

So we came to a gray area where we silently agreed to disagree.

I have also had to convince a lawyer I was not being sexually harassed; a building inspector I was not having issues with anyone; and a restaurant hostess I HAD been a patron in the past decade, not a rival looking to blatantly rip off the place.

But right now, hubby thinks the strangest research I've done to date concerns two storylines fighting for attention in my brain. One involves about 10 hours of the Discovery Channel on the DVR; the other involves six hours of last year's Winter Olympic Figure Skating (Ice Dancing to be precise) on the DVR. I'll get to it eventually; but right now with my schedule, most of my shows are now being DVR'd and not being watched 'in a timely manner', and the SU pouts when he has to delete any episodes of Stargate. He threw the same mild hissy fit when I was on the Law and Order kick last year. But then again, we had two TV's and two DVR's. Being downsized to one is just sooo much of an annoyance....(insert hubby whine; dramatic sigh, whatever).

But as long as I'm able to type/write in longhand/dictate story ideas, I'm sure some sort of strange research will be needed. But such is the life of a writer!