Bringing in the sleeves

So here it is the End Of Summer, and the harvest is coming in apace in spite of the atrocious weather, on which I will not pontificate, mostly because everyone is, all the time, but also because of the temptation to go on forever. Suffice it to say that it hasn't slowed down the zucchini - mind you, I've never seen anything slow down zucchini. (I'm reminded of those automatic ball-launcher things at tennis courts - ptui! ptui!) If I didn't cut them every couple of days they'd be flying up hitting the window. The blackberries are impressive this year, too, also undeterred by rain. The tomatoes, alas, are in the pits of despair, and the pepper plants apparently have the botanical equivalent of undescended testicles or something similar, as they can't seem to make it past puberty, poor scrawny things.

In the midst of it all, I've picked up a rhinovirus, for the first time in more than three years. I've gone through the standard stages of grieving: shock, denial, numbness, anger, etc. I am a snot volcano. Fortunately, it's moving fast: after three days I'm fully functional although I sound like end-stage TB. And I suspect the reason I stayed healthy for so long was the toxic roiling soup of hormones in my bloodstream, fluctuating faster than any microorganism could adapt.

Noticed the Zantac 150 ads on TV lately? This fat couch-potato gets some delivered with his pizza and goes into transports of redneck ecstasy over the prospect of eating all his favourite greasy foods and simply medicating away the natural and well-deserved consequences. This, in the face of a well-documented epidemic of lifestyle-induced obesity. So much for pharmaceutical companies having any real interest in promoting health. Seems to me they're the ones keeping HIV meds unaffordable in the Third World, too.