welcome to typhoid alley

There has been constant coughing, sneezing, snotting or wheezing going on at this house since January. I had 2 out of 3 kids stay home from school sick today and I was sick as well. This is one of the bad things about winter in Wisconsin. We never had a month 'o sickness when living in Hawaii. In Hawaii we had a wider variety of illnesses since the tourists brought their sick germs from exotic places like Japan, Australia and Nebraska by the boatload (literally), but we were outside so much more often that we just didn't stay sick for long. Here, though we're restricted for the most part to good old Wisconsin germs, they circulate around in the air for months as we're all trapped inside until it's warm enough that our nosehairs don't freeze off if we inhale too deeply when we're outside. I'm ready for spring.

Hubs has avoided the diseases so far as he's spent the last 2 weeks working in Hawaii. He was supposed to be home this morning, but due to a flight change, he was 'stranded' in Hawaii an additional day. I think he thought I was supposed to feel sorry for him, but I was too busy shoveling the slush out of the driveway to waste time on sympathy for him...especially since he said he was going to try to get a little surfing in before he left. I think I'm going to cough on him when I pick him up at the airport tomorrow.

Last night I took Angel #2 and her boyfriend to an open house at the local university. It's a small, two year school that's close enough to our house to make it an easy drive in. She started doing the math and decided that going there is a bit more economical than going to her school of choice. So, though she's already been accepted at West Texas A&M, I think she's going to stay closer to home and save a little $. She had a little epiphany last week when she was making lists of things she needed when she lives on her own and realized that buying those things takes money. Yep, who woulda thunk? So she's finally decided that maybe she should be saving a bit more of the green stuff than she has in the past and cut down in the impulsive gummi bear/tee shirt/concer ticket purchases. I'm glad she came to this realization at the age of 17 rather than at 25 when she's up to her eyeballs in debt and trying to figure out how to dig herself out of the hole. I got myself a smart kid!