Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with catch

I like not catching colds, but I also like kissing my wife

ManInSuit — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:42:13 -0800

If your spouse catches a cold, how likely are you to catch it from them? When your spouse gets a cold, what, if anything, do you do to avoid catching that cold, and why?

I wonder about this every time Mrs ManInSuit gets sick. I want to be nice to her, and enjoy her company. I also don’t want to get that cold. I wish I had a better sense of what the real risks are. So, say your spouse starts having cold symptoms (and you don’t have any). Here are some imagined possibilities of what that means:

Imagined Possibility #1 – By the time your spouse shows symptoms, you’ve already been exposed like crazy to their cold. If you haven’t caught it by now, it means you’re immune to that particular strain. So, like, don’t worry about it.

Imagined Possibility #2 – The fact that haven’t caught your spouse’s cold so far just just means you’ve been very lucky. If you want to avoid that cold, you should start being careful: keep your distance, don’t share cutlery, wash your hands a lot, etc. Otherwise, you’re pretty likely to get that cold.

Imagined Possibility #3 – Cold transmission is a pretty unpredictable and unreliable thing. For each day you spend with your spouse, there’s a chance you’ll get sick. But even if you’re totally incautious, the odds are you still won’t get that cold.

Can anyone shed light on which, if any, of these are most accurate. I suspect the truth is some complicated combination or in-between of all the above, but I’d like whatever insights the green might offer. Insights backed with reliable scientific sources or expertise are epecially helpful...

Sleepz?

sully75 — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:00:12 -0800

If you are really exhausted from lack of sleep and stress, x say 2 months off and on, what's the best thing to do to get back in good shape? I've had a pretty stressful couple of months (2 moves, started a crazy school program, lots of work, anxiety). I haven't been sleeping particularly well for a lot of it and also fell of my exercise routine that I'd been doing since January.

Anyway, I missed out on a lot of sleep. The last few weeks I've just felt weary. Sometimes I don't but it doesn't take much for extreme weariness to kick in.

So what do I do? I have a hard time sleeping during the day, or sleeping in. Should I force myself to lay in bed, even if I don't sleep? Or just try to get on a more regular sleep schedule and wait for things to fix themselves?

An additional problem is that I usually wake up a bit after sunrise and it's really hard to get back to sleep. And I play music at night so I'm often awake until 11 or 12. = I'm getting 6.5 hours of good sleep a night quite often, and 8 would be more like it.

Come in Tokyo

Dag Maggot — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 05:47:02 -0800

Where does the practice of saying "come in Tokyo" while pretending to adjust a woman's breasts like an old radio set come from? I don't do this- but I know someone who claims it's a reference from some TV show or movie.

verbal tic?

merocet — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:20:42 -0800

Where does the usage of "speaks to" to mean "speaks about" or "speaks of" come from. For example, "It speaks to our will to be goverened that we allow these things to happen"? Characters on Boston Legal are constantly using it also. It speaks to my frustration that I've not been able to find anything on its etymology on google.

How to catch mice better?

judybxxx — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 06:42:13 -0800

My basic mouse traps (snap) aren't working, what am I doing wrong? Help! In the fall (sometimes) mice come into our old coop-apartment building, and seem to come through my Living Room! Last year I caught 13, this year 3 over 3 weeks, and now they eat the peanut butter but don't snap the trap. I've cleaned the traps, but they still get it. I've tried other traps before, but these were the best. It seems that my pantry is accessible somehow from the attic. and actually, it is good to know where to trap. Last year, my next-door neighbors saw and caught several mice and then when I started trapping, they saw no more.

So, do I need new traps? I tried glue traps before, that was awful. and I don't want to keep driving a few miles to empty live traps. and I tried a little one, and it would snap and I couldn't tell if there was a mouse inside. So , once I released one, and once I drove miles for an empty trap. My mammologist friend says they come back from a long way off, not just a mile.

I want to catch them NOW, before they get established. Last time I bought traps it was hard to find the 'classic' snap trap - they had some with plastic pieces that were supposed to smell like cheese - seems unlikely to me.

I've got a million other things to do, so I'm hoping to limit the number of experiments. I thought there was dried peanutbutter buildup, that's why I washed them. But this morning all three traps had no peanut butter! I hate to feed them!