Given a choice of fast food restaurants, McDonalds comes last on my list. While I may be willing to swing through the drive-thru every once in a while for a drink or some fries, the actual burgers and sandwiches are just not high on my list of things I like to eat.

Yet once a year I make the pilgrimage to the golden arches for several weeks and grimly choke down McDonald’s food, all in the name of friendship. Beware of befriending vegetarians, in other words. Especially vegetarians who like beanie babies.

To be fair to my friend, I collect the cats too. But just the cats, and if that was all I was going for, I’d only have to eat one or two McDonald’s meals per year. But she also collects the dogs and the bears. And this year they have three cats, one dog, and four bears. Sigh. For the rest of the little critters I can get away with buying a bag of fries or a Happy Meal and then forking over the extra buck-fifty. But the bears require more. To get a bear, I must eat a value meal.

So I’ve been dutifully stopping by the McDonald’s on the way to work every morning in my search for the specific beanies I need. And then most evenings for the past week I’ve swung through both McDonalds’ in my hometown to see if they’ve got something new. My dream is to find three of the ones I need on one day. Sure it’d be a bad food overload, but at least then I’d be that much closer to being done for the year.

At least right now I’m halfway there. And I did luck out this morning since I was able to get two different beanies with the same meal.

The things I do for friends. Four down, four to go. And then I don’t have to go hear anything resembling a Big Mac for at least another year.