Or, My descent into complete and utter pointlessness.

There’s a great big ol’ grass fire upwind of me. The smoke’s flowing over my town and then just sort of stopping there. Seriously, the town five miles to the south has clear skies. It’s colored the sunlight a bilious sort of yellow. The contrast to normal light is so great that things that are normally white in full-spectrum sunlight are showing up as a sort of a blue/ultraviolet sort of color. It’s kind of neat to see, but perhaps flipping my polarized sunglasses on and off to watch the effects might not be such a good idea while I’m driving.

But aside from the nifty optical illusions, this crud in the air is really hard on us asthmatics. I never had much in the way of allergies until the last few years, but this week, even my normal daily nose pill isn’t doing squat. And, of course, it takes me two days of stumbling around with a blinding headache to put cause to effect and just give in and take the big guns already.

On Tuesday, it was so bad it was making me want to puke, so I gave in and went home. I took two Benadryl and crashed for an hour or three (with an evil kitten sleeping on me) and that started to take the edge off. By the next day, I was OK, but it’s starting to creep back up on me. I took a preemptive dose this morning, but Benadryl really knocks me out so I only took half. So now I have the allergy headache and I want to crawl under my desk and take a nap.

I may be able to get away with going home for a while in the middle of the day; it’s a slow day, but I hate to burn up my very limited leave time on actually being sick. And tonight’s Girls’ Night Out, with a concert in the park and new friends to hang out with. I don’t really feel like being a zombie for that, but showing up with bed-head and pillow marks on my face isn’t a great plan either. And since I’m driving, I’m sure the rest of them really don’t want me drugged up either.

What to do, what to do? (I’m probably going for the nap.)