Instant karma's gonna get you

I felt the telltale irritation in my throat the other day and knew I was in for a fight. It was either the cold or me, so I went on the offensive. The sniffles from my right sinuses were only a minor annoyance, and I knew they would get worse if I didn't do something quick. I believed with every fiber that I could still nip that sucker in the bud if I did the right thing.

So I did my usual chores inside, then spent most of the afternoon out in the yard, cleaning up after the storm that took down the neighbor's tree. The heavy work of cutting up the tree and stacking the limbs had been done, but the denuded trunk and a huge pile of branches was left to dispose of somehow. To minimize the amount we have to load in the truck and take to Kurtz Brothers for them to make into commercial mulch, I took the lesser traveled path.

If I tear the little needly branches off the big boughs, I can spread them around the flower beds as mulch and eliminate the middle man. When nature gives you a dead spruce tree, make sprucenade!

So far, that part of the plan is working perfectly. It took awhile, but there are now little twigs full of green needles covering all the perennial beds, and by the time the hostas come up in July our homegrown mulch should be a lovely reddish brown, nutrient-rich, weed-retarding layer of decaying organic matter. And I had the satisfaction of being outside in the sunshine inhaling fresh air while going through the labor-intensive process of saving a buck on commercial mulch. This appeals to me on so many levels.

The ulterior motive, aside from pure nordic frugality, was to use an afternoon of grunt manual labor to stoke the internal furnace to the point where no virus could survive. I was so sure of myself that I even started drafting a blog entry that night titled "Sven 2, Cold 0." This was the second time I've whupped the toxic attackers this year, and I was so very pleased with myself.

Of course you know what happened next. I woke up the next day with a full-blown, sneezing, runny-nosed, self-inflicted, hubris-induced, all-too-human cold. I won't gross you out by describing the all-day sniffling and nose-blowing in my cubicle, but my office mates can tell you how many gesundheits there were on Monday. I was not a happy camper, and I wasn't much fun to be around, either. Don't even ask if my work was top notch.

I would really like to know what I did to bring this demon virus on myself in the first place, but one doesn't usually get the chance to isolate particular causes of specific effects in this lifetime. Maybe it was the two days in a row last week that I did the taiji form on the left side only, not on both the right and the left sides, as I usually do (which begs the question of when a "positive" addiction is out of control). Maybe it was dashing from the car to the church a couple of times on Sunday without a jacket, but I doubt it. Maybe it was the extra jigger of Polish vodka in my Sunday night screwdriver that pushed my immune system over the edge.

Let's just make this whole thing a freaking moral parable, shall we? Maybe it's all because I haven't called my mother in a while. Yeah that's it. Insufficient filial piety is behind the common cold.

My point is that there are viruses around all the time; sometimes a person is more vulnerable to them, and sometimes a person's defenses repel the little attackers. Runners know that if you do your workout when a cold is coming on, chances are good you will sweat it out and not get sick. But sometimes the wrong workout at the wrong time drives the nasty little buggers deeper into the cells, and a mild cold becomes a debilitating force of nature. Then you've done the wrong thing.

Obviously I'm feeling a lot better now, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this tale of woe, I'd be huddled under three quilts watching Anthony Bourdain educate America on the finer points of the pastrami sandwich like I was last night. (Note to self: Eat lunch at Katz's Deli next time you're in New York.) I'm not completely over it, but I'm not suffering mightily and going through one handerchief after another like yesterday.

My initial hypothesis was wrong, so I caught a cold instead of warding it off. I'm wearing wool and lots of layers underneath, drinking tea, all that stuff. Now I'd do just about anything for a good night's sleep.