Upon Googling "common cold", you're likely to get the standard laundry list of symptoms: sneezing, coughing, mucus production, headache, fatigue, possibly aches and shivering. Nothing serious. The advice is very general: rest and plenty of warm fluids, avoid chills, take pills, see your doctor if it takes a turn. We're so used to common colds - hence the "common", vulgaris, meaning "low" or "plain" or "ordinary" - that we generally don't give them a second thought. We go to work and school with them, spread them around willy-nilly, shrug them off as little more than a seasonal occurrence. Colds are so mild in most cases that we simply forget we were ever sick. And because of their seemingly run-of-the-mill nature, very rarely do we see an instance of the cold - that is, a very particular one in an individual patient - described in any meaningful way. Part of this, of course, is the grab-bag nature of cold symptoms, anything...
Sorry not sorry, I love this weather. If you live in North America., you may have noticed a slight change in the temperature and precipitation across the continent as a large chunk of the polar vortex spun off and lurched drunkenly toward the equator like a bro at a frat party crashing toward the DJ station to loudly demand "Livin On a Prayer" for the umpteenth time (Jesus, there goes my metaphor...), changing a rainy, muddy winter into an instant Ice Age. Virtually everywhere in the lower 48 has been effected. The Deep South is in a deep freeze. Chicago is colder than most of Alaska. The roads are ice, the pipes are freezing, kids are being kept home from school simply because of the temperature. And I love it. It's a stark scene - the glaring, blinding white of the snow under a pale sun in a hard sky, making the shadows long and blue. The air is dry and shockingly cold; every breath is sharp in the throat, and the wind bites into my cheeks and wraps the cold around my...