Sneezy and Throaty, the two sad dwarves

There's an old proverb, and it must be true, for I heard it from Sally Rogers:  "When two people tell ya you look sick, go lie down."

Medical history has proven that the common cold strikes the common man more than a thousand times worse than a woman, a gender filled with people all of whom are uncommon and splendid in my view.  But give a man a cold, and watch what he can do with it.

I first noticed the onset of this cold at 3:49 AM on December 7. We were fast asleep on our vacation week when the smoke detector in Peggy's Zen room decided to malfunction. (There is an unwritten law among smoke detectors that requires all malfunctions to occur during sleepytime.  This stems from the sad fact that the smoke detectors never get to sleep, and this is the only way they have to point that out.)  So anyway, as I ricocheted around the house trying to find the source of the ruckus, clad in my rakish nightclothes, I noticed that certain signs of an incipient cold were present, and once the errant detector was yanked from the ceiling,  I went to the kitchen for a cup of cough-y.

As the days went by and the coughing and snorfling continued, I took time to put my personal affairs in order, awaiting the inevitable.  Peggy came down with a cold as well. We even cancelled our annual trip to the fabulous Christiana Mall in Christiana, Delaware, "Where Marylanders Pay $12 in Tolls To Save $3 in Taxes.''  It's true, so true: there is no sales tax in The First State, and we were hoping to see Christine O'Donnell working at Hickory Farms or something, but we just confined our shopping to the closest 117 stores to our home.

I went back to work as scheduled on Monday, but by Tuesday, my supervisor had joined Peggy in telling me to go see my doctor, bringing the above slogan to mind.  Dr Deloskey, King of All Family Medical Providers, sized me up in a quick hurry, and told me I had either a sinus infection or an upper respiratory one, and prescribed a Z-pack, Mucinex, vapor-y nose spray, Claritin, Acetaminophen, and egg nog. Just kidding about the nog, which was self-prescribed, but all of those items are much better with a little rotgut whisky added.

A couple of days home finished up most of the coughing, and now here I am, all ready to enjoy the holidays.  I hope yours are sweet and happy, and cold-free.