This isn’t what I had in mind, Winter.

About a month ago, I wrote a letter to Winter, asking for a bit of snow. Specifically, I hinted at the fact that we needed some cold weather to get the snowflakes falling. Winter did indeed receive my letter, and paid attention to it. Over the past week or so, it’s been quite cold, and we’ve even got some snow. One of the times, we even got enough to take our toddler sledding. (Which, I might add, was probably one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done this winter.)
Winter, however, has a sense of irony. I asked for some cold weather and a bit of snow. Apparently, the wintery powers that be also interpreted what I said in another way. They changed my phrasing a bit, so instead of “I want some cold weather and some snow”, they also apparently heard “I want a cold.” Or at least, that’s what I have to assume, because they sent me a cold. The sniffles and, generally, the inability to breathe through my nose? Check. Coughs that make my chest ache? Check! Generally feeling nasty? Double check.

I’m one of those people that is fairly lucky when it comes to getting sick: I don’t do it very often. On average, I probably get one cold a year. Maybe two, if my luck falters a bit. However, while I don’t get sick very often at all, I seem to make up for it in duration. My colds aren’t one week wonders, they’re more like a month long marathon of coughing, sniffling, and generally feeling yucky. My mom actually got this cold right around the same time I did; she’s been done with it for a week now. I, however, am still chugging through DayQuil and NyQuil, while simultaneously trying to set a world record for the number of Kleenexes used in a three week period. I’d say I’m getting close to the point where I need to be calling Guinness.

I suppose there is at least one good thing about being sick: it helped me finish The Dark Tower, and has given me a wonderful start on Insomnia, too (hovering around page 300, thank you very much). Having felt like crap for the past few weeks, the bulk of my spare time has been spent laying in bed and reading. That doesn’t entirely make me happy about being sick, but it blunts the ickiness of the situation a little bit, anyway. There is also another good point about my cold. While it seems to be lasting a short lifetime, it isn’t very severe, at least not in comparison to some colds I’ve had in the past. I haven’t, for example, had to resort to saying “Thag you very buch”, like poor old Bilbo at Laketown.

I ask that you forgive me this slightly whiny post (and yes, I know, it’s whiny!) I think I’ve done fairly well on keeping the “such angst!” posts away from this blog, so I figured I was due one. The cold gave me good fodder for such an entry. Now that it’s written, you can expect another 6 months or so until the next one.