The Bumpkins get the Sniffles

Tony woke up with a sore throat one day, and a snotty nose, and assumed he was deathly ill. He gargled with salt water and swallowed lots of honey, but that didn't help. Looking on the internet for a cure didn't help one little bit either. In fact, some of the suggested remedies put him to paroxysms of rage and made him feel even worse. Especially the one from a rampant Christian Scientist who said there is no such thing as a blocked up nose that dribbles snot constantly, or a throat that feels like sandpaper; it’s all in the mind. Stupid jerk.

This is how both of Tony's legs
looked the last time he had penicillin

After a couple of days of suffering and sniffling, he went to see the doctor, who said he had strep throat, and prescribed some antibiotics.  But as soon as he got home and took one of the pills, he remembered that he's allergic to them, and lived in dread of an outbreak of hives for the next few hours.  The next day, he saw the doctor again and got a different prescription.  Just when he was wondering what to do with the first pills, Linda announced that she had a sore throat, and almost immediately started coughing and sniffling.  So she started taking the first batch of pills, and joined Tony in his misery.

That night Linda couldn't sleep for coughing, and Tony had only been asleep for ten minutes when Linda woke him up and told him he was snoring. Of course he denied it, rolled over and started snoring again.  But after being elbowed a few more times, he moved to the spare room where a small mattress is hidden to help with such emergencies. As soon as he lay on the mattress and tucked himself in, the smoke alarm went off, so both of us rushed around the house looking for the blaze, but there wasn’t one. So we deduced it was a spider that set it off. 

How does thing work again???

At midnight the cat woke Tony up by hammering on the cat flap, and continued do so for at least an hour. Although she's been using the cat flap all her life, she still hasn’t quite got the hang of opening it, especially late at night when people are trying to sleep. So eventually Tony got up and let Pepper in. She ate four 'cat munchies' the size of a pea and then immediately needed assistance going outside again. Tony went back to the spare room, turned out the light, couldn’t see a thing and banged his head on the piano as he crawled around on the floor looking for the mattress. After an hour another spider ran across the the smoke alarm and set it off again. 

At that point, Tony gave up on the idea of getting some sleep, and got up and booted up the computer to read the news.  But the news was all about the refugees in Europe - too depressing.  Would this night never end? 

We spent the next three days feeling sorry for ourselves, not doing any work at all and drinking lots of medicinal brandy.  We're better now, which is great, except that we have no excuse to drink brandy, and have to get back to boring crap like housework and lawn mowing.  And when Linda went outside for the first time in days, the verandah steps collapsed under her, throwing her onto the lawn in a most unladylike manner.  While she was lying there, she spotted something strange in the gum tree, which turned out to be a nest of disgusting Spitfire Wasp grubs.  Sometimes life can be so tasteless.