Christmas's Sizzling Aftermath

Yes, I admit it.

We turned my 14 year old son into a pod person this Christmas. No, not one of those scary pods from the old sci-fi movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", but a brand new "ipod". Ian loved the ipod and imminently went to the "iTunes" site where he can download songs for .99 cents each. The ipod we bought was the 20 gig model, which means you can put 5,000 songs on it. I don't think have 5000 songs in the whole house. I was pretty impressed with the thing, heck maybe I will get one for my own. To complement the ipod, we also bought the ipod boom box to go along with it, you can put your ipod in and listen to it without the headphones , perfect for lugging outside on a sunny afternoon.

Everything was just going swimmingly, no glitches on Christmas day and I was pretty pleased as I drifted off to sleep with visions of sugar plums in my head. Suddenly I heard "MOM!" I jumped out of bed expecting the tree was on fire or something equally terrible. "Mom , my i boom is making sizzling noises!" What? what the heck, I walked into Ian's room and saw the ipod boom box sitting on the bed innocently. Picking it up, I then noticed a liquid dripping from the bottom and heard the ominous bubbling noise. Ok, this is bad, I held it at arms length and took it downstairs and held it over the sink as it sizzled and popped.

What the heck is going on here, I opened the battery cover and saw the problem. The 6 D batteries were sizzling and bubbling and leaking acid everywhere. And these were brand new batteries just bought that day! I dumped the batteries in a box and cleaned the acid off the plastic cover. Thank goodness Ian was awake when it happened as I don't think it would be too pleasant sleeping in a puddle of battery acid.

Don't buy store brand batteries, these were Albertsons batteries and on sale. I am sticking with Energizer from now on. One thing I have to give to Albertsons, when I took the batteries back, not only did they refund my money, they gave me 6 replacement Energizer D batteries for free.

And so the sizzle saga ended well.