Sorry about your codes! What do you do at the gym?

Knock on wood, I've been largely cold-free this winter. I attribute it to much more liberal use of alcohol hand sanitizer and general hand-washing.

Mostly take spin classes, but I also do the treadmill, elliptical, a few weights, or anything else I can talk myself into.

I'm so aggravated. Because of my thanksgiving trip, then a scheduled two week closing of the gym for renovations, then my catching a cold right after that, I basically missed a month of working out. I was finally getting back into the swing of things when the grandbun was born-which slowed me down a tad. Now this....ARRRG.

(Not that this is A Big Problem in the scheme of things, especially compared to others here right now, but still.)

My trick for staying code-free is Never Shop. Not a realistic bit of advice, but seriously I really do most of my shopping in open air places (and I'm lucky enough to have that option for almost all my basic needs). I usually find that if I have money to do regular shopping at xmas and get crammed into those little shops with tons of people, I end up getting sick. I'm kind of agoraphobic/claustrophobic anyway, so I avoid close quarters like crammed buses, etc. and being fairly hermit-like means I've had No Colds or Flu this year (plus good diet, I guess... and knocking wood).

But working in offices, or having anything to do with kids, forget about it. Santa Flu has you on his list, and he's checking it twice. He's gonna find out where you live and come pound you to bits, whether you've been naughty or nice.

One thing I cannot help but wonder...living so near to the base and all-all those people deploying back and forth and moving here and back again and all that...seems like this location is the perfect place to be exposed to just about any germ one could think of. That being the case I really do need to appreciate the good health I have enjoyed over the years...

BTW my town is a terrible place to be if one has allergies. I don't, thankfully.

My workout is speedmarching at about 4 mi/hr with about 65 lbs. I've gotten sick every time I've gone out of town to see my son -- apparently the emo stress (a real high high followed quickly by a real low low) clobbers my immune system. Sinusitis (usually bloody), bronchitis, and no workouts -- two weeks of infuriating enforced idleness at a time. I get cabin fever.

One of the worst places to be, cold-wise, is on a ship, or even more so, a submarine -- if one crew member has a cold when the boat sails, *everybody* is gonna get it. The reprocessing of air on subs kind of clobbers virii (there are CO₂ scrubbers and burners, you electrolyze O₂ out of water, filter the air, ionize it slightly, etc.) but it's a confined space, you're close together, and it's inevitable. But after the first couple of weeks on a deployment, everybody who's susceptible to that particular rhinovirus gets it, has gotten it, and is over it, and unless you put into port somewhere (rare for subs) or tie up alongside a tender or take aboard riders while deployed (rarer), for a couple of months nobody has to worry about sneezing much.

The same thing has happened to me, bunnyfire. I had one cold last year and it happened on a 3-day weekend so I didn't even have to miss work. And then right after Thanksgiving, and then right after Christmas, and now the end of January I got sick. Like stay in bed all day and whine kinda sick. And I'm frustrated and annoyed beyond belief.