I’m working from home today and the kids don’t have school so we all slept a little late this morning. About an hour later than usual the kids and I piled into the car and I drove them to their father’s house. It’s a Dad weekend so my wife and I won’t be seeing them until the middle of next week. That sucks, but it’s the way things go around here.

I came home and sat at my computer with a bottle of water, a breakfast bar, the vague notion of looking for random people’s Best CDs of 2014 lists to see if I could stumble upon some new music, and about an hour to kill before I had to punch into work.

I stood up to take my breakfast bar wrapper to the trash. I sneezed, boom. I immediately sneezed again, boom boom. Then three, one-two-three false alarms in a row. More sneezes were there, but they just wouldn’t happen. I went to the bathroom for a tissue and blew my nose. It was like opening the flood gate. Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, runny nose, runny nose, runny nose, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, false alarm sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, sneeze, runny nose to infinity.

That was about five hours ago. The sneezing hasn’t stopped. The runny nose hasn’t stopped. I’ve used about 20% of the one box of tissues left in the house. Remember the movie Twister where about half of every character’s lines throughout the whole film include the phrase, “we had no warning,” or at least some variation of that? That’s what this morning feels like to me. Just out of the blue, BAM! Head cold. How did it happen? There was no warning! It’s a category five and I had no warning!

I think I know what happened. It’s going to sound weird, but in that Sherlock Holmes method of after you remove every impossible reason whatever left, no matter how improbable, has to be true way it makes perfect sense.

I think I am allergic to January.