I have the strangest allergy issues. Not as bad as Diana, who I suspect can't even function without her drugs, but still strange.

I crash on the couch to do a little reading, and start to fall asleep. Oliver comes up and crashes on my lap, so I give him some rubs and he goes to sleep to. About a half-hour later, I wake up sneezing and snotty and coughing and just a mess. It all goes down just in time for Diana to get home after a late tennis match, and she heads straight to bed.

While it seems the worst of it is past, I crawled into bed and could hear myself audibly wheezing, to the extent I'm worried I'm going to wake up my exhausted companion. So here I am crashing on the other couch, killing time until I start breathing in a normal fashion.

Sometimes the strangest things set me off. When I was in Washington, the fabric softener or laundry soap that Diana's bro used on the sheets set off the same kind of respiratory chaos. Certain smelly stuff just kills me, and then it's made worse by other smells that would ordinarily be benign.

Hopefully I can sleep this one off quickly. It's cold down here by myself!