Mild Amusement

As the Mild Fiancée will tell you, I'm the kind of person who reads labels and follows instructions. She's more likely to go off script when it comes to recipes , but I do as I'm told. I don't know if there's an ironclad defense for this, but it's served me well enough over the years. Well, as it turns out, reading labels can lead to hilarity. First, let's start with the infamous teaspoon incident. It has become lore in the Mild Fiancée and I's relationship, and I laugh about it every single time. The background for this particular story was that I was sick. I had a pretty nasty cold going, complete with the runny nose and sinus issues that plague me from time to time. The Mild Fiancée had some medicine in the cupboard, so she gave me some in the hopes that it'd help calm my symptoms. And I swear to you, I felt better within minutes. That stuff was magical. I was impressed by this magical elixir, to say the least. I immediately went about trying ...

People who have talked to me in the recent past know that my allergies have been acting up far more than usual lately. I've never really been a sickly person, but I have been sniffly and congested more in the last few months than in the last few years before that, combined. What makes the whole experience so bad is that it makes you unfit to be in public (do *you* want to hang out with someone liable to get snot on you?) and it makes you feel miserable. I started taking medicine on a daily basis to try to keep it under control, but every now and again, it would still flare up. Worse yet, it was entirely unpredictable. I've had myself tested to try to determine to what I was allergic, but nothing conclusively really came up (dust mites, pollen). I dusted and vacuumed regularly to try to prevent any of that from building up and causing problems, but every now and then, my sinuses would just decide to rebel for no apparent reason. I also know that although I can handle the col...

Among the other fallout from my recent Houston trip , I ended up with a pretty nasty sounding cough. I didn't feel sick, but I sounded pretty bad. In fact, I got through a fairly intense "bootcamp" class with that cough, so I figured I was fine (side note: the running joke seems to be that I had mono). Still, I sounded sick. It got bad enough that I figured I'd use a sick day a couple of days after I got back to rest up. A day of rest is usually enough to help me recover from colds & coughs, so I figured I'd be back to the grind the next day. And since I was being all good about taking care of myself, I went looking for cough medicine, too. If I was actually trying to make myself get better, it couldn't hurt to actually try to make myself get better. Now I haven't been sick enough to take medicine in a while, so I had to ask where the medicine was. My mom pulled out a box of the stuff, and then wandered off to deal with something else. The fir...