The Mother Of Invention

It is 2:13 a.m. on Day 8 of The Cold, and I'm not sure how much longer I can take it. This is a war of attrition and to be honest, the troops are running low on morale. If you recall, I named the illness I had in Europe the Parisian Death Virus - that was high on intensity but low on staying power. This cold is lasting for so long that it almost doesn't need a name - it's starting to just be the new normal. And for me not to name something this vicious is a sign of how sick I really am.

However, since I've had nothing but time on my weakened hands, time to sit and think about all of the great things I could be doing if my body hadn't betrayed me, I've come up with a brief list of ideas that would make dealing with the common (or Uncommon) cold a little easier.

1. Cough Syrup That Doesn't Taste Like Poison. I can't believe no one has come up with this before now. Do they make it taste so bad on purpose, so people don't chug the stuff like it's Kool-Aid? You know, the way they add that rotten egg smell to natural gas? It's the only excuse I can think of. Health care is a multi-billion dollar industry, with some of the brightest minds in the world innovating miracle cures every day, and the best they could come up with for coughing is a liquid that looks like anti-freeze and tastes like black licorice? I don't know about you, but I think if the ladies on '9 to 5' had slipped some of this in Dabney Coleman's coffee instead of rat poison, he might have caught on. Just saying.

2. Cough-Powered Wind Mills. There is so much potential energy wasted every day in a sick household, and I'd like to reclaim some of that with a tabletop windmill that harnesses coughs. It could provide energy for my humidifier, or possibly the television that has now replaced me as a parent to my two youngest children. If it could also capture the snoring from both me and my sick husband, we'd feel a lot better about being sick because, hey! We're saving the world!

3. Body Replacement. The engineering for this one might be a little tricky, but go with me for a minute. My (obviously) adroit mind is trapped inside a failing body, so my thought is to take my soul/spirit/mind/essence/what-have-you out of my body and into a replacement body. That way my real body can go and recuperate and I can continue to function at my normal capacity. It's like if my car were in an accident, no one would expect me to keep using it - I'd take it to the auto body shop and drive around in a rental until my car is fixed. Same concept.

4. Rent-A-Mom. With both Ryan and myself out of commission, what we really need around here is a Mom. Someone to cook and clean and keep up with the laundry and interact with the kids so that their only contact with other humans is not whoever answers the phone number from their favorite infomercial. We need someone around here to take care of us - the kids because they're kids, and us because, well, deep down we're still kids too. And the laundry pile is starting to be daunting.

Well, that's all I've got for now, but I thought I'd post it so that someone could get started on the non-poison-tasting cough syrup. By the time it's invented and gets FDA approval, I'll probably still be in need of it. This cold isn't going away anytime soon.