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this nasal congestion has now turned into a full-scale allergy attack. i've got all the symptoms: running nose (i'm probably going to go through a box of kleenex a day), coughing, sneezing, and occasional eye itch. i've also pretty much lost my sense of smell which means i can't really taste anything either. i blame the ragweed, which i'm now seeing on sides of roads as i ride by, inhaling invisible grains of pollen. the one thing i don't have is an itchy throat, which is how i usually know i have an allergy, but maybe my sore throat is masking the normal itchiness.

the one good thing about suddenly having all these allergy symptoms is i can finally expel my nasal congestion (a very polite way of saying i can blow out my snots). up until now, i had that stuffy feeling in the back of my throat, but i just couldn't clear it. now that my nasal passageways are having a meltdown, i no longer have that problem. i'm hoping after this is all over that it will also have fixed my longstanding congestion problem.

the bedroom door was mostly painted, just needed some touch ups, didn't even really need a second coat. there were some dried paint streaks that i sanded flush, and then applied some new paint on those areas. and any place that looked like the bottom layer was peeking through, i went over a second time (all using the smaller brush, which is easier to control). since the paint was out, i went around the house patching up little areas (baseboards, door casing, window frames) that needed some paint.

it'd be a motorcycle ride today, so no travel pogo for me. arriving in belmont, i had some bread that tasted like holiday panettone and a bowl of rice noodles with chinese meat balls. the thing to watch was the olympics coverage, which spanned several NBC-owned channels. it made it hard to navigate. fortunately NBC has an olympics channel for roku, which is a much better way to watch the olympics, with free access (as long as you have a cable subscription) to all their streaming video coverage. i watched some fencing and then spent most of the afternoon watching women team archery. i was surprised to see taiwan competing (under the debasing designation of "chinese taipei"), as they nabbed the bronze. it was russia against the south korea in the finals. it seems like while all the teams were playing checkers, south korea was playing chess, and they were in a league far ahead of all their other competitions. but i was more interested in the russian team, as they had two members (inna stepanova and tuiana dashidorzhieva) that looked distinctively central asian. i had to look up their stats, discovered they're buryats, or northern mongolians. that part of the world seems super interesting, i'd love to visit one of these days, just that whole border region between china and russia.

my mother and sister were out shopping and taking the dog for a walk. earlier my mother asked if i wanted to come, but i said they would probably be out for a long time. sure enough, they didn't come back until 3 hours later. my mother bought a clover wonder knitter, after watching a youtube video of an english woman using one to create all sorts of pretty scarves. it's the sort of gadget that a crafty kid might use, and the body of the knitter is composed of translucent glitter plastic, which indicates the intended target audience.

i returned home after dinner. with no more work on the guest bedroom door, i started cleaning up, throwing away the newspaper on the floor, and removing the few pieces of tape on the ground. now it's mostly superficial cleaning, like reorganizing the inside of the fridge and cabinets, and decluttering the kitchen and living room.

after a shower, i watched another episode of the night of before turning to olympics coverage for the rest of the evening. i watched as michael phelps helped team USA win the 4x100 freestyle relay. phelps is some sort of sea creature. the way he swims, it's not even human, particularly the way he undulates underwater for distance before breaking the surface.

i took a claritin tablet in the afternoon which had zero effect. in the evening i took 2 benadryls. benadryl makes you sleepy, and some people even use it as a sleep act. so much so in fact that the label has a warning for parents not to give their children benadryl in order to get them to go to bed. i didn't believe it at first, but within about a hour after i took the benadryls, i was feeling very tired and wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep for the night.