It would appear that I’ve negatively reacted with something I’ve eaten or come in constant contact with…

Saturday night, I started noticing a pronounced ‘itchiness’ around my hands.  Nothing too intrusive but a mental note was taken.

By Sunday night I could barely sleep.  I woke up numerous times that night in order to deal with itches coming from everywhere, particularily my back, which or course, I had difficulty reaching.

By Monday the wife noticed with a calm but inquisitive  “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOUR BACK?!?!”

My response was the typical “Dunno but boy am I itchy!!!!!”

Her response “You should go to the doctor”

Me: “Oh come one… I’m fine.  I’m sure it’s nothing”

Well, it’s now late Tuesday and I hardly slept a wink last night (well, okay… that’s partially because Barry and I were gaming until 1:30am).  But during the night, seeing as I wasn’t sleeping anyway, I decided to do a little digging online at WebMD.  Turns out it is very likely hives… something I’ve never experienced before.

So I go to the pharmacy and pick up some antihistamines.  So far, they’ve helped aleiviate some of the itchiness but I’m still scratching.

So the question is… what the hell am I suddenly allergic to?

My only two known alergies are manual labour (makes me sweat) and bullets  (makes me bleed) but I’ve successfully managed to avoid those two things for many days, so I’m fairly confident neither are the culprit.

Aha, but if we think back… Friday Sunswan and I were shopping at Costco and picked up some ground flax seed (SunSwan said she heard good things about it).  Saturday morning we added some to our breakfast cereal and again on Sunday morning.  Hmmmm…. not totally conclusive but it seems to be the most likely candidate.  So, I’m gonna stay away from that for awhile.

And the next question… WHEN THE HELL ARE THESE DAMN HIVES GOING TO GO AWAY?!?!??!

Damn…. they’re on my back, my hands, my neck and a few spatterings here, there and everywhere.

Ahh, the joys of aging… new allergens.

Now about the ‘drives’ part…

Barry and Darci came down to attend a food show so they stayed with us for a few days.  Barry had just been here the weekend before for a 72-hour gaming and scotch session and it was great seeing him.  He had brought down some products from the bakery so we could photograph them so that I may have some photos for a new website I’m building them.

Anyway, they had brought down some more products to photograph.  I’ve already snapped some 90+ photos and they are on my hard drive of my laptop.  I’m downloading another batch of photos from the Canon 5D and the good old “you’re running out of hard disk space” message comes up.

No problem… I’ll just dump them on my Lacie external drive…….. okay, that’s not good…. the drive is making ‘sounds’.  It never makes sounds…  Hey, why is it not showing up in explorer?  OK, this is going poorly.

Looks like my just-less-than-two-year-old external drive is shitting the bed as we speak… lovely.  My immediate thought “What am I about to lose that I never backed up onto the server?  Hmmm…. it’s probably important”

This sucks.

So, after coming to grips with the reality that I’ve lost something significant but have no idea exactly what that may be… I head off to London Drugs to source out something new (hey, I was going for antihistamine anyway, right?)

So I walked out just a little lighter in the wallet after purchasing drugs and a new Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB portable drive.

Now I realize that isn’t exactly the most interesting piece of news, like a new blog widget or something… but we can’t all live charmed lives…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go up my meds.