Allergic to our wonderful Spring? It just figures...

The weather has been amazing in Chicago in the last several weeks. Yesterday was only five or six degrees above the normal average temperature for that date -- and a lot of folks complained how "cold" it was.

Today will be colder still -- frost warnings are posted for tonight in the western suburbs -- but that's almost certainly because the Cubs open at home today. It wouldn't be baseball season without cold and damp weather. (The rain is expected by Saturday evening.)

Still, this year, today, when the Chubbies open, the ivy on the Wrigley Field wall will be nearly all green -- amazing for this time of year. But it's consistent: Our lilacs are already past their peak. Usually they bloom in time for our anniversary in early May. The forsythia bloomed before the lilacs, as is customary. What departed from custom was that they bloomed in March. Mid-March. Flowers are leaping out of the ground. Lawn services are already busy (our grass should probably be cut, too). The magnolias have bloomed and all the other flowering crabapple and other trees, too, the delicate pink and white blossoms, and the maple seeds are starting to helicopter, and... and...

My nose is stuffed. My eyes are red and watery. I feel like I've swallowed a bucketful of phlegm. I originally thought I'd caught cold, but this has persisted for weeks now. I took increasing amounts sinus pills, the kind that honest people have to sign their lives away for, lest we set up meth labs with our 40 pills or capsules.

I'd get some relief, but I grew more fatigued with every passing day. My doctor explained that I was sending my blood pressure up through the roof. He wants me to snort seawater up my nose instead. If I'd wanted to snort things up my nose, I would have taken advantage of the cocaine occasionally offered to me in the 1970s.

Well, says my doctor, we're having a mega-abundant-spring; seasonal allergies are therefore in overdrive mode as well. "And," he adds, with just a delicious twist of malice, "seasonal allergies tend to get worse as we get older."

Thanks, Doc.

Sometimes I've been accused of being insufficiently curmudgeonly. But not today, buster. No siree, Bob.