Okay, so I'm one hour into the New Year, and got work that needs to be done, and instead I'm here.

By the sound of the car door and barking heelers, youngest son just got home, having spent the New Year's Eve playing video games with fellow Jazz Band members.

Eldest son spent the evening at The Return of the King.

Wife and I enjoyed her family tradition of fresh-boiled shrimp dipped in her secret recipe horseradish sauce. Watching Two Week's Notice.

Yeah, I know it's got Hugh Grant in it, but it was fun (although predictable) just the same. Sandra Bullock has to work hard to make a bad movie (but she has... look at Speed II).

Other excitement New Year's Eve? Game warden dropped by with a present... elk lymph nodes. "Just to let you know I'm working," she said. As I went down to set this sample in the larger basement freezer, I found...

A lymph node sample.

On the floor, the sample bag leaning against the freezer.

Now, nobody's been in that freezer since before we went south for the holidays. Like, for at least four or five days.

Sample was kinda liquified inside the little round plastic case. Says something about the quality of the sample cases that there was no aroma. Even more impressed that the heelers, with their developed olfactory prowess, did not sense this laying here.

Found the second lymph node sample laying on a nearby box.

The confessed culprit is the wife, who claims it must have been an accident.

Accident?

If an accident, why wasn't there a box of frozen peas on the floor, or a tv dinner?

Nope, just my two deer lymph samples.

Yeah. I refroze them. Basement should have been fairly cool while we were gone, and the prion that we're looking for with chronic wasting disease samples is hardy. According to the lab guy, when asked how rank of roadkills we should be collecting from, "if you can tell it's a lymph gland," the prion will be intact.

But I don't want to be standing at the lab bench when he opens these two.