I'm recovering from a bad cold/allergy day I had yesterday. No thanks to a very LONG Friday spent with a group of colleagues at Sentosa, on a department retreat. Remember the one I went to about 2 months ago in Malaysia? Well, this was a mini version, for the rest of the team.

My day started at 615am, and didn't end till about 1030pm!! It was tiring, hot, cold, fulfilling, sleepy, exciting, interesting...all wrapped up into one 14-hour day. And totally worth every effort and cent spent on it!

I think because I was so drained by the day's end, and hopping in and out of cold function rooms and sunny verandahs, I caught a bad cold that literally left me drained and dehydrated by Saturday night. No fun that, let me tell you.

Major Gripe: And what irks me the most, are the ones who persistently suggest certain foods or vitamins like vitamin C, hot Milo or oranges as cure-alls. These things NEVER work, believe me! If they had, don't you think I'd have known about it YEARS ago!? And besides, unless you've had an allergy cold like mine, you really don't know what you're talking about. If I catch it early enough, a dose of Cirrus helps keep it under control, more or less. But if it gets full blown, nothing helps short of really strong doctor-prescribed cold medication with some serous antihistamines which only ends up putting me to sleep! I think because I've always had this problem, it's now second nature to me. Friends and family don't realise how much I'm affected when it hits. They just see me sneezy and red-eyed, blowing my nose the whole day, laughing when I sneeze 8 times in a row, NEVER realising how exhausted it leaves me. I can't think straight or concentrate, and the only activity I really want to do is active bed warming. I'm not asking for sympathy or pity but for pete's sake...vitamin C WON'T help and its NOT a fun thing to blow one's nose every 30 secs and make a joke out of it!!

Now it's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I'm torn. Just read in the papers that there is another book warehouse sale nearby, yesterday and today only. I was at one about 3 weeks back and recently purchased more books at Borders last weekend. I think I'll give this one a miss...for book health reasons. LOL!