Sneeze.

Ugh. My allergies are kicking my ass. I don’t fully understand why. It’s fall, nothing is in bloom, but I get it every year. I finally went to an allergist a few months ago after battling allergies with OTC meds all my life and he gave me a new allergy test. Rather than take a lot of space and tell you what I’m allergic to, I’ll sum it up this way: trees; grass; oh and most trees and grasses.

So I’ve brought in the heavy artillery and am set to start with shots on Friday. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve basically been unable to breathe trough my nose from the age of 5 – or at least as long as I can remember. I’ve tried all the pills/nose sprays under the sun to various levels of success, but no magic bullet, so I’ve basically resigned myself to the snuffling, sneezing, watery eyes and such at various times of the year as the status quo. From what I hear the shots help people a lot and in some cases can even rid you of the allergy symptoms all together. I remain optimistically pessimistic.

My test also showed mild allergies to peanuts and mixed nuts, which seems odd as I think I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for my entire school career and young adult life with no ill effect. Maybe it’s just killed brain cells I don’t know about. That would actually explain a lot of things.

With the arrival of fall comes another of the regulars of the change of season – yeah, yeah, the leaves change colour and all that and are breathtaking blah blah blah – but it also is time for what I’ve dubbed the Big Atlantic Canadian Switcheroo. The is the time of year (or it will be soon) when the lawn furniture goes into hibernation, the summer toys are put to sleep, pools are covered, and the blueberries and rasberries are wrapped in burlap and stuffed with leaf mulch. The plastic sleds and snow shovels emerge from their summer dens to be at the ready and we see our first glimpses of snowblowerous combustionea as it prepares for the long winter’s work ahead.

While I’m on the subject of cooler weather, I take a moment to pose the question; what is with children and jackets? Rather, what is with children and their opposition to wearing said jackets? I don’t understand this. Julia gets all grumpy each morning when I tell her she needs to wear more than a sweatshirt – IT’S BELOW FREEZING OUTSIDE. We’ve explained the freezing process and the subsequent effects on humans – still each morning, the protest – “Do I HAVE to wear that big jacket? Great. SIGHHHH.”

It’s bad enough with them, but at least I can insist they wear stuff. What really throws me is when I drive by bus stops in the morning and see the teenagers in their wet hair, wearing only a long sleeve t-shirt and still sporting flip-flops. I know I sound like an old codger, but that’s just dumb. It’s one thing to want to “hold on to summer”, it’s another to blatantly flirt with pneumonia. I mean, pneumonia WILL win. It has for centuries, weren’t you paying attention in your history class? Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!