It's a gloomy grey Saturday here in San Francisco. Daisy is baking cookies with a friend, Hank is doing a jigsaw puzzle with a friend, and I'm puttering around. It's borderline quaint around here.

The cookie baking process is pretty amusing. Daisy and her friend like to invent recipes. They've made bread and cake on past occasions, and today's concoction is for marshmalllow cookies. Although the end product is likely to be inedible, the process is darn cute. Two six year old girls semi-covered in cookie dough? All I have to do is add a kitten and I can post that picture here.

Speaking of random stupid links, today's contestant is a phobia clinic. This organization has pages dedicated to fears like Coulrophobia, which is the fear of clowns. They explain that the symptoms of coulrophobia are

shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea, and overall feelings of dread

My favorite part is where they explain the "true cost of living with Coulrophobia".

If you are living with coulrophobia, what is the real cost to your health, your career or school, and to your family life? Avoiding the issue indefinitely would mean resigning yourself to living in fear, missing out on priceless life experiences big and small, living a life that is just a shadow of what it will be when the problem is gone.

For anyone earning a living, the financial toll of this phobia is incalculable. Living with fear means you can never concentrate fully and give your best. Lost opportunities. Poor performance or grades. Promotions that pass you by. coulrophobia will likely cost you tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime, let alone the cost to your health and quality of life.

Wow, the fear of clowns can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars! And your health!

That's not the only fear they can solve. Other fears include:

Anthophobia - fear of flowers
Arachibutyrophobia — fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
Asymmetriphobia - fear of asymmetrical things
Aurophoba - fear of gold

Those four are merely the most amusing ones in the "A" section. They have a list of 452 different phobias. For all 452, the list of symptoms is:

shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea, and overall feelings of dread

And for every single one of the 452, the true cost? Yep, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is bad news for me because I seem to have suddenly developed a case of Phobophobia. Yep, fear of phobias. This explains my sweatiness. Thankfully, they have a cure for that one too.

I think my two current favorite phobias on the list are:

Zemmiphobia - fear of the great mole rat

and

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia -.... any guesses?

Nope, not the fear of hippos. Nor the fear of monsters. It is the fear of long words. Although the cost of this fear is incalculable, it comes to roughly hundreds of thousands of dollars.