Pitiful Wednesday

For the last twenty-plus years, I have been taking two puffs in each nostril of a nasal steroid called Flonase. Before I started the puffs, I would get an allergy attack about three times a year that followed a regular cycle: first a little congestion, then a lot of congestion, then the congestion would move down into my lungs for a week or so, before eventually fading away.  These attacks were miserable for me - lots of coughing, rattles and whines in my lungs, a general sense of fatigue.

After Flonase, the attacks mostly stopped, at most once a year, and sometimes years would pass with no problems. I am a Flonase evangelist because it works for me.

Except when it doesn’t, like this week.  On Monday, the last day of my early voting polling place work, I started coughing.  When I got home, it started getting worse.  I took some NyQuil which let me sleep, but I woke up worse off.  All day Tuesday, I was either sleeping or coughing and I had to skip my workout and my Tuesday poker game. (Nothing worse than sitting at a table with eight other people in close quarters, coughing all over the cards and poker chips.). Today has been slightly better, but it’s going to be a slow recovery.

It may be that this is a cold or some other virus and that the Flonase is not relevant.  I was making contact with or breathing in the exhalations of over five hundred people in the polling place, after all.

Whatever.  This is just to explain why the journal has been quiet lately.  I really am committed to this project, and I have been worrying about my lack of diligence.  And then I would roll over and take another nap.

We will see how I feel tomorrow.  I have a workout and a guitar lesson scheduled and my mother wants me to get her car registered in Texas, so I really need to get it together.

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I finished April 1865 on Monday and came away admiring the book very much.  Jay Winik, the author, has an interesting narrative style - he tracks the timeline of the month, and when a new character is introduced, he does a deep digression into that person’s history.  I learned a lot about Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Jefferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, and John Wilkes Booth.  I also got a better understanding of the incredible number of casualties in the Civil War, some 600,000 men, and the astounding amount of damage done to Southern cities.  And mostly I came away with an appreciation of how much worse things could have been (and conversely, how much better off the country would have been if Lincoln had lived).

My supervisor at the polling place saw me reading the book and asked me what it was about.  When I told him, he was interested, so on my last day. I gave it to him.  Had I not done that, I would probably have kept it in the library.  I recommend it.

Next up: Big Bang by Simon Singh, an in-depth review of the origins of the universe.  I remember taking a dive into this book about ten years ago and getting bogged down in the science before skipping ahead to the end to find out that no one really knows where the singularity came from.  That was a bummer.

But I am going to double down this time, inspired by my wife’s dogged reading of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.  That book was huge and dense and technical, but she finished it over about three months and can say that she has a law person’s understanding of atomic energy and weapons.

It would be cool to have a layperson’s understanding of the universe after finishing this book, but I will settle for a better appreciation of the scale of the universe.  (I am in the camp of believing that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe that we will never encounter because light-years are immutable and in the 10,000 years it would take for another civilization to answer our SETI call, we will be long gone.)

Now, chicken soup.  Wish me well.