The days are slowly shrinking, the nights are cool and crisp, leaves rustle as they blow across the grass, and before we know it, once again that wonderful time of the year is upon us… Cold and Flu Season! Yes, I know you were thinking I was talking about fall, but alas I have been afflicted with some nasty little bug, which has slowly consumed my daily life. It is amazing what a little microscopic organism (or if we really want to get technical a protein based RNA chain) can make a human body do to itself.
Now for those of you that have yet to experience a cold recently might be in for a bit of a shock when you head into the store to try to find anything that will help reduce the pressure so your head doesn’t pop off, coughing and wheezing until your chest hurts, and doing your best imitation of a bubble blowing machine with the snot running out of your nose. All the cold medicine is locked away behind a counter, and you have to find the pharmacist to come help you! So there I was yesterday at the grocery store with the wife (who claims she gave me this bug, but thinking back over the last week, she didn’t remotely sound anything like a frog,) looking for some simple medicine to patch me up enough to make it thru the work week. We are standing there, staring at little boxes tucked away behind a locked piece of glass, trying to locate anything that might treat the symptoms I exhibit and very conscious of the pharmacist standing there ready to copy my driver’s license and watching us like a hawk to make sure we aren’t acting suspicious (to be explained a little later.) Now the real trick to this whole cold medicine is finding something that works well in the daytime (aka something with enough pseudoephedrine to dry you out and stimulate you) and something that will allow you to sleep (ala Tylenol’s Sinus PM which uses another type of medicine to make you drowsy while still keeping you dried out.) Now knowing my luck, the grocery store did not have any of the handy day/night packs like they used to, rather they had the individual day type cold medicine and the individual night time cold medicine.
What’s the problem you say? Why not just buy both individual packs, have the extras laying around until the next time you get a cold? Well thanks to a nice new “anti meth” law that recently was passed, consumers are limited to a certain amount of pseudoephedrine based cold medicines and requires any retailer to record your driver’s license info for entry into the state pseudoephedrine consumer database. So now if a person wanted to buy both the day and night packs, the poor sick soul will find themselves unable to, as the daytime pack has to much pseudoephedrine in it to allow you to also buy the night time pack! So there I am trying to figure out what in the world I am going to buy that might work, barely able to talk as my voice has a timbre similar to a cross between a donkey and a bullfrog, trying to explain this situation to the pharmacist, all the while feeling like I (a completely law abiding citizen who is obviously ill) am a criminal for wanting to buy 2 different packs of cold medicine!
I ended up buying the daytime stuff as it is imperative that I actually make it thru work (big and important product is coming on line) and let the pharmacist take down my information to be entered into the database where I will be checked to make sure I am not a meth head. Interestingly enough, this is the point where I realized that my birthday was at the beginning of the month, and my driver’s license had expired! She must not have noticed! We leave the store feeling a bit perturbed, and the wife (who always thinks about my welfare… well in all honesty, she probably was more interested in actually trying to get some sleep and not listen to me cough all night) decides that we are going to find a night time pack of cold medicine. We go to a different store where we manage to purchase a night time pack (all the while feeling like a kid trying to buy beer while underage… not that I ever did that, or had anyone do that for me… ) using her ID. Really when you look at the whole situation, what we did was a simple enough solution, but never the less it is a sad state of affairs when a sick person has to travel around breaking the law just to try to feel better. I understand why the law had to be passed, but when you are feeling like a truck hit you, you don’t really much care!
As a resident of Nebraska and of the midwest, I know I shouldn't probably post this picture as it will only perpetuate the folks from those "big cities" view of Nebraska, but hey I thought this was a bit humorous. I also felt it captures what many travelers of the beautiful Nebraska back roads might run across during harvest time. The wife and I were coming into Loup City, Nebraska when we were slowed by this "traffic jam." The source of our slow down? A farmer driving into town to deliver his load of corn. Followed the guy for about 5 miles before we were able to get passed him when he turned off at the mill. Its just one of those things that you deal with out here in the midwest. I'll take this kind of traffic jam any day over sitting on a freeway parking lot!
