It was a rainy day, although the sort without a whole lot of actual rain. Just gloomy and cloudy, misty and muggy, Thursday all around.
I was off from work today, but I spent a good amount of time checking my work e-mail, off and on, nonetheless. I’d been waiting on a book chapter for a couple of weeks, and both I and the acquiring editor whose book it is are out of the office, and his assistant had been out of the office since last week, getting back today. So some off-site coordinating and e-mail forwarding was in order.
I also spent the day trying, yet again, to get caught up on Kaleidotrope slush. I just have way too many submissions at the moment, both for what I can reasonably fill into a year and for my own reading sanity, and it’s been slow going trying to get caught up. I think I’ve finally read everything up to and including March, which is a start, but you really do start to re-evaluate what makes a story good when you’re paying a cent a word out of your pocket for it.
(Out of hope and necessity, then, I put up a donate button on the Kaleidotrope page. I’m already looking at more than $1000 expenses for the year. Those word counts sure do add up, don’t they?)
Other than that, the day was mostly spent fighting allergies. I bought some Allegra-D — it’s got pseudoephedrine, so they have to scan your driver’s license, even though one box would probably make for the world’s tiniest methamphetamine lab — but I was a little hesitant to take it. I’ve taken Claritin-D before, which is roughly the same thing (they didn’t have any at the drug store), but this recommends taking on an empty stomach. And I went out to a local Japanese seafood buffet for dinner tonight and left with anything but an empty stomach. And being on your own, suddenly, does make you (or at least me) hesitant about trying new drugs, even over-the-counter antihistamines like this. What if I have a really bad reaction? What if I need, but can’t get to, a doctor? What if I die here? Who’ll be my role model, now that my role model is gone, gone, he ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl…
Um, maybe I’ll just take it tomorrow before breakfast and see if that helps the runny, itchy nose and near-constant sneezing.
That was Thursday.
I take prescription Allegra (in fact, I wasn’t even aware it was available OTC now) and have never had any bad side effects from it, even when I’ve had an all-too-characteristic moment of absent-mindedness and taken a double dose by mistake. And I never bothered taking it on an empty stomach, either. It does seem to help, even though it’s never quite enough to knock out all my symptoms at the worst heights of allergy season.
Of course, you might turn out to have a completely different physiology from me, so if you take it and keel over dead, I’m not responsible. 🙂
And now I have Paul Simon stuck in my head.