Bad Eggs, Dirty Water and Inventive Son

BAD EGGS:
Sara noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from a certain spot at the end of her bed. Since she has a difficult time maintaining a spotlessly clean room, I suggested that she look for some uneaten food she may have left in a lunch bag. Then I went to bed. Shortly after midnight I heard gagging and coughing noises coming from downstairs. It seems that the ever-curious Sara "sniffed out" the problem and discovered it to be Ukranian eggs she designed at January's Art Day at her school. Her curiosity got the best of her, so she cracked open the eggs and "black goo" oozed out. The smell was "the most awful smell" she'd ever experienced which sent her into fits of gagging and coughing. She couldn't re-enter her room, so she spent the night downstairs in the vacant bedroom. Maybe her room will get a cleaning after all.

DIRTY WATER:
Did you know that if you call the Public Works Department in our city after hours you get to chat with a police dispatcher? That's what happened last night. I noticed that our toilet water was dirty even after I flushed it several times. We compared the tap water to the toilet water and there was little or no difference. Disgusting!!! I checked the water in our other toilet and it was the same brownish-yellow color. I called our next-door neighbors and their water was similar to ours. My next call was to Public Works/Police. The dispatcher paged the someone from Public Works and we got a call from a city worker a few minutes later. They'd received a similar call from another resident one street up from us. The worker couldn't explain our problem and said he'd come out to investigate this morning. He also said that he thought our water was probably safe to drink and that some sediment may have gotten into the water supply. I hope our water returns to its "normal" state and color today.

INVENTIVE SON:
Two days ago Mark got a sudden-onset sore throat. He told me he couldn't talk--at all. So, as necessity is the mother of invention, Mark navigated to his new favorite website (www.expressivo.com) and let the computer talk to me. It nearly drove me nuts. When I asked Mark a question or tried to get him to respond to something I said, a few seconds elapsed (while he was typing his response) and I heard a computer-generated reply. Sore throat or not, Mark's dad put an end to that form of communication when he arrived home from work.