Oy, it's always a joy to bring up pollen.com and see Orlando in the top spot as the worst place in the US to be for those afflicted by seasonal allergies. The scale used to only go to 10, now it goes to 12 and we've been in the mid-11s this week. Tomorrow's only a 10, so at least there's that. I've been taking my daily Zyrtec, which does seem to help keep my sinuses from getting too clogged up. But when the pollen level gets this high, it does nothing for my eyes. I literally can't even step outside without my eyes starting to burn and itch and water, and then it takes a few rounds of Visine-A to make me stop wanting to rub them right out of my head. For someone who loves to be outside, why must nature torment me like this? I love oak trees! They clearly do not love me in return. I try to restrain myself from rubbing because sometimes I rub myself right into a case of pinkeye. But good golly it's hard not to rub when they itch SO BAD KILL ME NOW ACK

Sigh. What else is happening.. not much, really. Work this week has been okay, though I'm having to pick up the slack because the other half of my team has been out--last week it was because his mother-in-law was ill and his wife had to fly up to New York to see her, and this week he went to the conference in Nashville I sometimes go to. He actually had to leave that early yesterday to make it out of town before this winter storm hit--turned out to be a good idea, as his originally-scheduled flight did get cancelled. But he was set to take today off anyway, so he'll be back tomorrow. And it's about time!

I've been keeping up with Better Call Saul, which I'd very much been looking forward to. So far I like it. A colleague here thinks it's been a bit too slow to get going, and I do see what he means. But I still like it. It seems to be going interesting places, and it would appear it's about to crank things up a notch now that we're finally getting around to more of Mike's piece of the puzzle. Next week's episode oughta be a good one. And that bit in this week's with Tony the Toilet Buddy, hilarious. Also started watching the new season of House of Cards, and have not been disappointed. Good stuff it you liked the first two seasons.

Okay, back to work. I hope everyone is having a good week!

Bullet-point style!

• My eyes, MY EYES! I mentioned I washed my car weekend before last--the next day it was already covered with pollen, and it's finally gotten to me. I've started taking my Zyrtec, which I think I largely avoided last year, but even so my eyes have been watering and burning nonstop for the past couple days. I hope I'm not miserable this weekend, since I plan to be outside for a lot of it! Meeting my grandmother at a campground over near Mom's tomorrow, planning to go to the spring plant sale at Leu Gardens sometime Sunday, and then an outdoor photoshoot that evening. And probably another park or yard work or something in there somewhere as well. I may need more Visine-A too. At least I haven't gotten too runny yet, my eyes seem to get the worst of it these days.

• I feel like a bad LJ citizen lately--been posting more, and I very much appreciate your comments, but I know I've been a bit lax on commenting myself. In my defense, I didn't get on the Net at all during my California trip last week, then we had a busy weekend, and then work has been nonstop this week. Plus..

• Yesterday I spent 3 hours on the road, 2.5 of which were sitting on I-4 with Parking Lot Mode fully engaged. We had our semi-weekly meeting in Deland, and on the way there we saw a flatbed tractor-trailer had overturned, blocking lanes and with bags of mulch spilled all over the road. So we went to our meeting, then stopped for lunch as usual, and figured they surely MUST have gotten those lanes reopened by now, right? Wrong. We had chances to get off and take an alternate route, but at those points traffic was still flowing just fine, so we were optimistic. But when we did finally hit the backup, it was severe, so there we sat. Once we finally got past it and traffic opened up, we saw another truck and trailer flipped over in the opposing lanes blocking traffic that way too. A cursed bit of roadway that day!

• Flights and hotel are booked for DC! I have a rental car reserved too, but I'm leaning towards cancelling that and just using public transportation for the whole trip. Might take a little more time and be a little less convenient (or maybe not, driving and parking around DC usually sucks), but it would be a monetary savings. I took my mother-in-law's recommendation for the hotel, and it looks like a nice place. It's also right on the new Silver line of the Metro, which was supposed to be in operation by now. But it's not, and recently got pushed back to more like summer. Would have been nice if it had been up and running in time for us! That's actually one of several bummers: 1) still no word about the Washington Monument reopening; 2) cherry blossom peak bloom is now forecast for April 8-13, so we'll probably miss out on the bulk of that; 3) White House and BEP tours were denied, too short notice. I'm not too disappointed, I guess--we'll have fun at the museums and monuments anyway. The blossoms are a bummer, though--I'd be tempted to push the trip back a week if there was a good airfare option. Which there actually is, but it would mean leaving on Saturday April 5, and we have something special planned that night. So I guess we'll stick with what we have and hope for the best. Also hoping for nice weather, and currently (for what little it's worth) the extended forecast is cooperating.

• So Amazon is raising the price of Prime from $79 to $99 for a year. I think that will price me out of it--$79 was tough enough to justify, I don't think I can go to $99. It's very nice to have, don't get me wrong. I love that I can need one little thing and order it on a whim with free 2-day shipping. But clearly I'm spoiled. Before Prime, of course, we'd basically store up those little items until there were enough to qualify for free standard shipping, which takes longer but that usually doesn't matter anyway. There are calculators online where you can put in how many orders you made in the past year and it will tell you if it's worth it, but their math is based on the assumption that you would have placed as many separate orders without Prime, and would have chosen to pay for 2-day shipping every time. Neither is likely the case, though. We do use the Instant Video service occasionally, but not nearly enough for it to be a big factor. Heck, we ditched Netflix because we found ourselves only rarely using it, and Amazon's service is no Netflix. I have until my current Prime membership expires in June to think about it, but at this point we're leaning towards going without.

• Seems like there was something else, but now I can't recall anything. So I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!