Boredom at work = Mutant Christmas Projects

It's a general rule at work that you never say things like "It's been slow today" or "Mighty quiet around here" or yadda, yadda, yadda. But, my gosh...it's been slow lately. (I want all of you to know that by saying/typing this outloud I have just cursed myself with 17 rollover accidents, 3 heart attacks, 4 broken bones and 47 "I've had a cold for 6 weeks but tonight, at 2am, I decided to come in and be seen.")
Anyway, on Thursday night we were slow/quiet/bored and got looking at fun Christmas project. I was showing the girls the baggie wreaths and one of our doctors said something about the cool "plastic cup globe light" that his neighbors gave him last year. Of course, we had to see it, so we googled it for hours (it was only about 6.5 minutes but when you're bored it feels like that long) and decided we would each make a couple to take home and surprise our kids with. We sent the most bored nurse out to gather supplies (OK, she wasn't the most bored...she's the only one with access to a dremel tool so she won by default) and anxiously awaited project hour.
She returned slightly less successful than we'd hoped. The project calls for 9 oz. cups but apparently everyone in town decided to make the same ball because there wasn't a single package of 9 oz. cups in all of Wal-Mart. She's quite the crafty thing so she settled on what had to be 2 oz. cups and just figured our balls would be smaller than the average balls. (heehee...I have to laugh a little at that one)
The original directions we were following said to connect 9 cups in a circle for the first layer. Our first layer ended up with something like 24 cups. Seeing as how the supply list had only called for 50 lights for the ENTIRE ball, we knew we were in trouble. We kept plugging away and ended up with what looked an awful lot like this sweet lamp my mom had in the late 70's.
Long story short, our lamp mutated. It's officially 4 times bigger than it was supposed to be (we used 200 cups and 200 lights) and therefore bigger than any one of us wanted hanging in our homes (we have standards, ya know?).
It is now the Nurse's Station Ball. It's big, a little awkward, looks more like an egg than a ball and required some serious reinforcing to ensure it didn't pull the ceiling tiles off but I LOVE IT. I'm so proud of my little 3am project even though everyone that walks by it looks at it with a little sideways glance, unsure of what, exactly, it's supposed to be.
Please enjoy my pics and THEN take a look at this website to see how cute they could be. There's even instructions (although we didn't use the soldering iron or whatever it is they suggest, we just stapled the cups together - perhaps another factor in the mutany???).

My odd shaped, tenticle growing sparkle ball. (Notice the 'N' in tenticle, not 'S')

Me, so very proud of my tenticle growing sparkle ball.

By the way, I thought I should mention, that due to the making of this entry, I have had elbow pain, hand lacerations, chest pain and croup walk through my door at an otherwise "dead" hour. I'm telling you, the curse lives.