The pollen count has not been high this week. In fact, because we got so much rain over the weekend, the pollen count is forecast to be extremely low today. But my hay fever is not always strongly correlated with the pollen count. I generally assume that’s because I also react to molds and spores that are not always captured in that count.

I haven’t had horrible hay fever symptoms most of the week. Itchy eyes and mild congestion on a couple of days. But when the weather started changing (the first real rain in months hit Friday night, there were drizzles in the early morning, but the rain didn’t come until quite late), my sinus congestion got worse and a headache slowly built up. I tried a couple different combinations of medicine on it over the weekend, but they didn’t help much.

It was bad enough that I pulled out the bottle of prescription strength nasal spray. I don’t like resorting to it because one of its side effects is having really intense disturbing dreams. Because it contains a steroid, it suppresses immune response in the sinus membranes, so I often wind up with a sinus infection after using it. But the headache was really getting to me, so I decided late Saturday night to give it a try.

Except I noticed that the expiration date on the label was a while ago. I have used it a couple of times since the expiration date, but I didn’t know what the risks were after the expiration date, and it was the wee small hours of the morning, so I didn’t really feel up to researching the issue on line. I grabbed an ice pack to put on my head, instead. And I was able to get back to sleep. The pharmacist got a good laugh when I stopped in on Sunday and put in the request to ping my doctor for a refill. I last filled the prescription a whopping five years ago.

We had a few other misadventures over the weekend, though nothing as bad as some of our friends. Event though the high temperatures during the day outside were in the mid- to upper sixties, I couldn’t got the house below 80 until quite late Saturday night. We had all the windows and the front door open, with fans placed strategically around the house to try to create a flow that would push the cool air from outside through everywhere. It’s one of the downsides of a brick house. Those bricks hold heat for an awful long time.

It was bad enough Friday night that the combination of the heat (and to be fair, we turned off the air conditioning because it was below 70 outside by sundown, so we had ourselves to blame a bit) and my sinus headache, I kept waking up getting no more than an hour’s sleep at a time. I felt as if I was waking up my hubby every time I woke up and tossed and turned, so I moved down to the living room in the recliner at about 5:00 am and aimed two small fans at me. Then I finally slept for four hours straight.

Along with the even heavier rain we got Saturday came a lot of wind. Trees were blown down all over the region, knocking out power lines everywhere. More than one of our friends was without electricity for over 24 hours. We wound up with a few of them over at our place Sunday afternoon, recharging all of their devices and just hanging out to visit.

There was also, Saturday morning, the incident of the overflowing toilet. Still not sure what caused that. But it was followed up Sunday with me not being able to get the bathroom sink faucet to turn off. We finally figured out I was being mildly dyslexic and turning the cold off while turning the hot on, then reversing the other way. In my defense, Michael couldn’t figure out what was happening at first, either. After he shut things off under the sink, he experimented a bit. Because of the low-flow fixture, there were no discernable difference in the flow of water between barely turned on at the faucet, cranked halfway, or cranked all the way to full. So you can’t really tell whether you’re turning one side (say the cold) down if the hot is on even a little bit.

We’ve now got the under-the-sink valves turned back to about a third pressure (they were turned on full force before), and now you can tell the difference as you adjust the faucets.

He did ask me if my horoscope for the weekend had said anything about trouble with water, since I seemed to have several incidents.

Since I virtually never look at such things, I couldn’t say. But I think it’s more likely that the sinus headache and the interference with my sleep pattern are more likely culprits.