Oh my, but we are tired of the rain here in the Southeast -- middle Tennessee, in particular, but all around us it's soaking wet.
I don't complain about the rain much, and it seldom affects my mood or sense of well being. But we have had SO MUCH rain that I'm beginning to be weary of it all and it just might start putting me in a bad mood.
But hope springs eternal, and it appears we are done with the rain and dreariness for a while. We woke yesterday morning and this morning to beautiful sunshine. It's cold, but I can take the cold if it's just not wet for a while.
I wrote those first two paragraphs a few days ago, then got distracted with something. I'm pleased to say the bad mood never came, but it was getting close.
To go with the yucky weather, there is all kinds of sickness around. There is an ongoing debate about whether the cold temperatures make us sick. My parents and their peers all believed it religiously, and that's how I was raised. Going out in "night air," walking around barefoot, going outside in chilly temperatures without proper clothing, going outside with wet hair -- all of these made me a candidate for sickness in my growing-up years.
When I raised my own children and relaxed those rules a bit, every time one of them got sick, 90 percent of the time, my parents and parents-in-law attributed it to their being cold. Passive-aggressive comments and not so passive-aggressive comments were duly noted.
I have to wonder what my folks might have thought a few weeks ago when I was diagnosed with pneumonia. It was Super Bowl Sunday and I had been fighting a cold for about a week. I thought I was feeling better but over the weekend the cough became worse.
I told Wife that Sunday morning, to be on the safe side, I was going to go to a walk-in clinic and get checked out. The doc there listened to me breathe with her stethoscope and said, "I think you have pneumonia."
I requested that she listen again because surely that could not be correct. Another listen and a chest x-ray confirmed her suspicions. Right then and there she made me put on a mask, told me to cancel my Super Bowl watching plans and stay home and rest for at least the next three days. That, along with a breathing treatment and an antibiotic, seemed to do the trick.
Somewhere my parents are shaking their heads, saying they knew I would eventually get sick if I kept going outside without a heavy-enough coat on.
