I didn't kill you.... You're Welcome!

[Getoutofmylobby]

Tour busses will always terrify me. A lobby full of smelly, disorganized idiots clamoring for room keys...

Now.. a tour bus full of CLOWNS?!?!? That has to be the scariest thing imaginable.

[Noelegy]

Have you heard how some schools here in the U.S. have a zero tolerance policy for peanuts? No student can bring in any form of peanuts (good-bye PBJ) if even one child has serious peanut allergies.

That is so weird! I went to public school in a town where peanuts were and still are a major crop (they have an annual "Peanut Festival"), and I didn't know anyone who had a peanut allergy when I was growing up. I asked my mom about that one day within recent years; peanut allergies seem to have skyrocketed in the US, and it seems to be such a recent thing. She said she couldn't remember anyone having peanut allergies (or any other life-threatening food allergy, for that matter). And as she was a schoolteacher for many, many years, she'd been around a pretty sizeable cross-section of the juvenile population.

I'm not minimizing the seriousness of this, just saying I never heard of it before, say ten or so years ago.

[tollbaby]

Both my kids' schools have banned any and all peanut products, and my son's classroom has gone one further and banned anything containing sesame because one of the kids is allergic to sesame.

Will this kid die if she receives a whiff of sesame? No... thing is, this kid (who's ELEVEN years old) has a tendency to trade lunches. So the school, to cover their asses legally, has banned sesame products from that one particular classroom. Ugh. I ate nothing but peanut butter sandwiches between grade 1 and grade 12. Do you have any clue how difficult it is to come up with variety with all the fun restrictions we have these days? (Fortunately, my kids feel like they've won the lottery if I give them a chicken drumstick for lunch, and our local grocery store has regular sales on huge 24-30 packs of drumsticks, so I bake them and freeze them individually).

I'm allergic to bell peppers of all things (as in, will have difficulty breathing and throw up a lot if I eat them). You try eating out anywhere and asking people if there are bell peppers in anything. I had one waitress tell me "no, no peppers at all" in quesadillas (which are one of my favorite foods)... STupid me, I believed her. Took one bite, and found out that the filling was ENTIRELY composed of bell peppers with a little bit of rice, cheese and chicken besides. Good thing I carry an epipen

[reformedwaitress]

I'm very allergic to seafood -- as in if seafood is put in the same fryer oil as a french fry or chicken, even not at the same time, I still can't eat the fries or the chicken. It's too risky. I have to be careful of grills for the same reason. I am always very VERY appreciative of anything a waiter or waitress does to find out if I can eat their food. Often, they'll tell me that they cannot be absolutely certain and I just find something else. I'm used to this and not offended at all and I'm very polite when I ask, usually apologizing before I even start. No one's ever been rude to me about it, but there have been quite a few restaurants that have gone out of their way to feed me and I was very very appreciative of them. We tipped them VERY well!