I hate colds. I truly hate colds. It’s not really because I’m sick. No, I can enjoy a good, solid “Omigod I’m dying” sick as much as anyone else. I promise you, I can throw a pity party which would bring the roof down. I’ve done it.

I hate colds because you’re not *really* sick. You’re not unable to crawl your ass out of bed, and, if you’re even marginally honest with yourself, you’re not sick enough to beg a grandparent to take that child. You’re not sick enough to need any serious medicine. Depending on the field in which you work, you’re not sick enough to call in a sick day. Most definitely, you’re not sick enough to have your boss send you home with a full day’s pay. (There is nothing so heavenly as sleeping while getting paid for it.)

No, the cold I’m talking about is the one where your head spins a little. Like you’ve been drinking and you figure you can have jush ONE more. Yup. Uh-huh. Damn, de world look funny when I do dat. Been there? Hey, you’ve either been there from drinking or you’ve been there from a head cold, but I know you’ve been there. Like I said to the pharmacist today, this cold is a cheap drunk. She told me to go home and eat something.

This is the cold where you don’t feel sick enough to be, in my mother’s words, SICK sick, and you’re not well enough to be completely not sick.

At any rate, because my butt seems mostly fixed to this chair (except when my also sick baby wakes up and needs me), I’ve managed to haul together some word count.

40,850

My goal was to reach 50K before November 1 begins, and then to do another 50K during Nano. That means I need to do an average of 1300 words from now until November.

I can do this.

Unless this cold manages to haul out the mental whiskey.

30 206 words … I have an hour until bedtime. Let’s see what I can manage.

31418 words at midnight. That’s 1212 words – NOT enough for doing Nano next month.