Achoo!

Spring is finally here in force. How do I know? Easy. Hayfever has struck, with a vengeance, over the weekend.

Now, fortunately, my share of this astonishingly frequent ailment is not too bad, but I can feel it when I overdo exertion outside in pollinated air, and since I enjoy being outside in the early spring... well, that happens. Which results in sneezing, an itchy nose and itchy eyes as well as the feeling that I am not functioning at full power. Depending on how bad this is, I can shrug it off as "well, happens" or get seriously annoyed by it. (The symptoms also seem to get me more tired faster, resulting in me needing even more sleep. I should have been born a cat, probably.)

Since I've had this affliction, I have regularly managed to find out that while there are gazillions of pollen forecasts, I would much rather have a source for yesterday's forecast (or even better yesterday's actual data). I don't even know yet which pollen are the evil ones for me; I know which ones I do react to in general, but that does not tell me how much each of the three candidates is to blame. Because of too little data.

It was the same this weekend. On Sunday, I tried to find out what was in the air mostly on Friday and Saturday - no luck. But this morning, I found something even better: An online pollen/hayfever diary. You record the region where you have been, your symptoms (type and severity), can add additional remarks - and the symptoms are then correlated with the actual measured amount of pollen in that area. Yay! I'll be testing this to see if it works. After all, knowledge is power...