Rain, rain, go away—and take the phlegm with you

Dating back to my childhood, when, as Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin can attest, dinosaurs still roamed the earth, two things have traditionally happened each year before—or for some reason, more typically on—my birthday: It has rained, and I have been sick, usually with my first cold of the season.

Moving to Redding hasn't done much to help the precipitation predicament, since three of the 36 inches of rain we receive in an average year typically fall during October. But frankly, it's never seemed to matter where I've resided. Regardless of their location, the clouds have seemed determined each year to gift me with their liquid bounty. Even when Kelly and I lived in Southern California, we could be smack-dab in the middle of a mid-fall heat wave, and poof, it would rain completely out of the blue on my birthday. It’s been uncanny, really. As a result, I’ve just come to expect that I will get wet when venturing outside on any day when I'm turning a year older.

This birthday may be an exception. I selfishly hesitate to say so for fear of jinxing things, although the fact is, we desperately need the rainfall. Already in the midst of a severe, two-year drought, this season we're standing at a piddly 0.72 inches to date, while in an average year, we'd already have logged twice as much. Does it make me a bad person if I'm hoping, should the desire hit me, to extinguish the candles on my cake outdoors without nature's sprinklers dousing them for me? I hope not. I just want to be able to go outside and play on my big day. And with a forecast calling for a high of 89 and a zero percent chance of precipitation, it looks like I’ll get my wish.

By contrast, the recurring rhinovirus routine is looking far less promising. Since bringing home this week what is already our second family cold since school began just two months ago, Zoë has gone from bad to worse, waking up yesterday morning—perhaps in an empathetic effort to bond with her ailing cousin Aidan 669 miles away—with croup. Along the way, she's managed to share the love with Zienna, whose nose has been gushing green goo for a few days now, and, by the looks of things, Zach, who woke this morning clogged and sniffling.

And, though I'm hoping like heck that it's just allergies, I, too, began yesterday to recognize those all-too-familiar harbingers of the birthday bug—stuffy head, sore throat, and burning nostrils. I am presently popping Echinacea and knocking—no, pounding—on everything that even appears to have come from a tree in an effort to avoid my annual affliction. Heck, I'm just glad I got a flu shot several weeks ago, since the birthday I spent four years ago fighting influenza and a resulting partially-collapsed lung was, in a word, hell.

So, apparently able to forget about my umbrella, I'd also like to spend the first day of my forty-sixth year without a box of tissue at my side. Is that too much to ask? I guess I’ll know tomorrow.