A Puffy Predicament for Quasimodo

This morning I woke up in my tent feeling amazingly refreshed from a good night's sleep. There was one problem. My eyes felt huge and would only open halfway. Being that I was sleeping in my parent's back yard, I ran inside to see my eyes puffed up to twice their normal size. I started laughing and exclaimed, "I ATE Quasimodo!"

...

When I was a kid, I loved having friends and family over to sleep on the trampoline, under the stars. We'd douse ourselves in bug spray to keep the gnats and mosquitoes away from our heads. This made it so we could stare into the night-sky and wait for that 1 shooting star before our eyes became too heavy to stay awake. The trick was to have a wish ready to make, and to see if we could make the wish before the light of the meteor vanished from our eyes.

One morning, I woke up on the trampoline with puffy eyes and lips. Random places on my face were bulged out like I had received cortisone injections, and it made me look like a mutant. One eye was puffier than the other, and I could barely see. Various parts of my lips were swollen triple their size, which made my speech nearly impossible to understand. In my confused morning daze, I went inside to try and figure out my puffy predicament. As soon as my older siblings saw me, teasing hit the roof! My brothers started calling me Quasimodo. Naturally, as a young girl, I became upset from teasing and yelled, "I HATE Quasimodo!" Problem was, my puffy lips made it sound like I yelled, "I ATE Quasimodo!" Everyone started laughing and exclaiming, "Megan ate Quasimodo! Megan ate Quasimodo!" At the time, it made me very upset, but it's became a common story amongst friends and cousins to laugh about.

At that time, my puffy predicament was caused from mosquitoes, but what about this time? I was sleeping in a net tent, and it's too cold for mosquitoes this time of year. As I was laughing about eating Quasimodo, I did a little bit of research on "waking up with puffy eyes". Turns out, eating too much sodium before bed can cause a person to wake up with puffy eyes. Once again, I started laughing at myself.

Yesterday, I got out the 1975 food dehydrator that my parents hadn't used in years. We followed the marinade directions step by step, even though it seemed a little peculiar at times. After 12 hours of drying, I tried the newly made jerky. The first one was salty beyond belief, so I tried a few more pieces to see if the massive amount of sodium was consistent between all of the jerky. I concluded yes, and so did my body, when I woke up with bloated eyes.

This puffy predicament concludes that maybe Quasimodo needs to either protect himself from mosquitoes or stop eating so much sodium before bed. I'm convinced. ;)