Shiny happy pores

You know, it's really hard to maintain a degree of personal hotness when you feel like you have a hairball stuck in your throat.

Has anyone else been dying from allergies this year? It seems like this is my worst year ever, to the point where I actually invested in allergy medication and still feel like someone shoved a bunch of socks in every orifice of my head. On the good side, it has helped the sinus pressure. On the bad side, the IT department hates when I drool on my keyboard at work. Oops.

Today was almost a freaking vacation at work. EPOD has been stricken with some horrid cold so he has basically been AWOL all week. Dave's wife finally went into labor at 41.5 weeks so he was missing all day. Chachi was at the jobsite until 3 PM, and Chris was so delirious that Dave was going to be out for a few days that he disappeared to the "jobsite" (read: sports bar to watch basketball). I basically read emails, surfed the net, and tried to do as little as humanly possible without it being blatantly obvious that I was goofing off. Oh, and I managed to slide in a two-hour lunch to get a facial from Celeste the Skin Goddess. I might feel like hell, but my pores are downright sparkly.

Ever since I went off Yasmin back in October, my skin has been a virtual Mardi Gras of Unfortunateness. Either I have a zillion blackheads, or I get a few huge cystic zits in strategic places like right in the middle of my chin. Excuse me, I am almost menopausal, isn't it about time for the acne to stop? Meanwhile, I still do my usual skincare regimen and have switched makeup brands four times. I went from MAC to Bare Minerals to Clinique and now finally seem to have settled on Laura Mercier which of course is only available at two stores here - Saks Fifth Avenue, where you have to take a home equity loan to just walk in the door, and Nordstrom which of course is like on the total opposite end of the city and beckons me like a siren with no credit limit. Geesh. So I will be relegated to purchase it via The Internet, which thankfully allows me to escape without buying $50 in lipgloss every time I go in the store (thanks, MAC, for feeding my lip-goop obsession).

*****

Updated: 10:43 PM. We just got home from the doc in the box. Monkey Man has yet another undetermined disease, this time he's running a fever and is achy (and has a headache), but the flu and strep tests plus a blood test all came back fine. The blood test only means we're probably at the very beginning of this thing and it hasn't had time to register as viral, but dammit - I am mad that I didn't get anything for a $20 copay and an hour wait except some Tylenol and crappy fruit punch. Sigh.

I guess I know what I'm doing tonight. And tomorrow. And this weekend. Bleh.