It's that tickly cough that is the most annoying

That wasn't meant as a deep title for this blog entry. I'm telling you the deep truth. The truth that is in my sinuses.

Its fall, and while most are enjoying the cool crisp days and the colors of the leaves I'm bracing for cold and flu season.

My germ phobia kicked into full gear when our daughter was born at the height of the H1N1 mess. I, sort on sleep and common sense would turn on the news at 2 AM while feeding our bundle of joy only to discover that the world was ending because of H1N1.

I'm not well known in general. I will however say that as far as paranoia and worrying go, in my little circle of friends and loved ones on this planet I tend to take the crown. Not trying to brag but I can obsess and worry about most anything at any given time. Jealous? Yeah, that's I thought.

Not that its an excuse, but I come from a long line of worriers. My grandmother was one of my best friends and dare I say a prodigy when it came to tying herself up in knots. She could worry about everything from garbage bags to light bulbs. Granted, she grew up during the Great Depression, her home burned to the ground as a teen and she lived through WWII. That may have had something to do with it. My basis for chronic concerns seems to stem from sterotypical childhood and teen stuff that makes me roll my eyes. If I think about it to much I want to kick my own ass based on nothing but the predictability and annoyance factor.

What worriers really are are control freaks. The worrying gets down to " HOLY CRAP I CAN'T CONTROL THAT!" which manifests into a crashing realization that we have no power over anything. This leads to and eventual break down that will leave us folding socks and placing them just so in the drawer because we can control the socks. ( Unless the socks are judging us. Then screw them)

Back to my point. It is cold and flu season. It starts small and ends up in a goobery mess mid Feb when we've all been behind our plastic covered windows looking out onto the frozen tundra that is our backyard. We live in MN. We expect it. So what can I do?

Well, back in the day they told you to bleach the hell out of everything. Now they say don't do that. Its bad for the planet, your lungs and it turns out killing everything makes bigger scarier germs. Ok. Fine. Then two days later they say be sure to wash your hands.  ( duh) If you do nothing else all day wash your hands. Alright. Done. A day later they say wash your hands but not with the antibacterial soap. OH! And don't use the hand sanitizer. Ok, you can SOMETIMES but really, you shouldn't. There's chemicals in there and those are probably bad. Now the public bathrooms have antibacterial hand foam that I maybe should or should not allow my child to use. So should I be carrying my own soap? Does that cross a crazy line?

So what I know is to wash your hands all the time and a sterile environment would be great but the bleach you need could wind up killing you. Of course so could the flu.

I'm going to go fold some socks.