Summer colds

When you have to blow your nose, literally any piece of paper can become a tissue.

There are those who spend their money on ultra-soft tissues that feel like wiping your nose with a butterfly’s wing. I personally don’t get this.

Perhaps it was in my upbringing. As the middle child of a large family, when a cold went through our house everyone would end up with it. I swear that if you looked closely enough at the brand of tissues my mom would buy you could see the wood slivers still there.

This has firmly planted in my mind that part of having a cold is feeling like you are blowing your nose with sandpaper. That’s how you know it was working. After all, you don’t want to be walking around like some preschooler oblivious to the snot running down your face.

The plus side of this is that anything above tree bark works for me as far as taking care of my runny nose needs. The key is to crumple the paper up and unfold it before attempting to blow your nose with it — believe me it greatly reduces the risk of paper cuts.

For the past few weeks I have been dealing with a lingering summer cold. It started as some congestion that I deluded myself into believing was just some seasonal allergies or something similar.

It was when the runny nose, watery eyes and general blechyness started that it dawned on me that I was probably sick and should maybe slow down a little.

There are people, so I have been told, who on the first sign of a sniffle take to their beds with soup and a warm blanket to ride out their illness. I tend toward the other extreme where I keep plugging away keeping my tissues (or crumpled up newspaper in a pinch) and hand sanitizer within easy reach.

Deadlines don’t care if you are feeling under the weather, and there is always something that needs to be covered or a story that needs to be written. If anything, I find that feeling like something left on the barn floor after the cows went to the pasture, tends to make me grumpier and at times short-tempered.

This is only aggravated by the challenges of learning new technology. For years, The Star News has used Adobe products for laying out the paper.

As what happens when any giant multi-national company gets too much of the market share, they put the squeeze on.

As anyone who is a fan of vampire stories can tell you, the challenge of being a bloodsucker is in leaving just enough blood left so that your victim remains alive. This is something that giant companies have missed, or perhaps they never heard that saying about trying to get blood from a turnip.

Any technology change brings its challenges and in this case, as we work through the process, it has caused some headaches. Attempting to trouble shoot some of these problems has led me to more than once considering hunting down in the basement for the old waxer, warming up the light table and grabbing an X-acto knife to put the paper together by hand like we did it in the old days.

For the young whippersnappers out there, this was when we had actual darkrooms and would have maybe 72 exposures of film for a weekend event and had to know how to use a photo sizing wheel. It was back when pica poles weren’t just for pretend sword fights when people got punchy after putting a big project to bed and went home half-blinded from staring into fluorescent lights for hours on end.

I think the cold medicine may have influenced some of these thoughts.

It is human nature to pine away for the good old days, where things were simpler and when you opened the hood of your car you could actually find your battery without having to consult the owners manual.

Things have gotten better now. Not just with the technology, which, fingers crossed, we seem to have gotten over the learning curve hump with, but also with my cold.