Man, I so did not even know wine allergies existed.

I had a glass of wine last night—McManis Cabernet Sauvignon to be exact—and not even a whole glass of wine but one of my wimpy half-a-glass deals. And when Simon woke me up at 4 in themorning I thought: I must be coming down with the flu or something. Stuffed nose, itchy eyes, sore throat, and generally feeling as though a steamroller had done its best to flatten me a couple hundred times during the night.

Darin let me sleep in today, and when I was finally conscious I said, Either I am coming down with the worst cold in the world, or there was something about that wine. So I clicked around a bit (the modern answer to every problem!) and discovered wine allergies.

From allergies.about.com:

The common question is “Can I be allergic to alcohol?” Although alcohol can be the culprit, it usually is not. The culprits are usually the additives used in the manufacturing process. Some of the possible culprits include:

    Brewers yeast

    Corn

    Eggs

    Grapes

    Molds

    Sulfites

    Pesticides

I am: bereft. It took me a while to prefer red wine over white wine (that is, to become a wine snob). And now this!

I assume that if any of those ingredients could cause this allergy then it’s not necessarily the wine that’s caused this head cold. But it’s not the kind of testing I want to do a lot of, you know?

Every Sunday I check Minerva’s horoscope in the SF Chronicle. Why? Old habits die hard. Anyhow, this week’s entry says:

LEO July 22-August 21
Do it! Do it now. A home office of some sort has tickled your fancy for some time. Maybe it’s a suite, maybe a small corner. Whatever, the size, time and effort spent there can change your life. Family matters are iffy, maybe even bittersweet. Perhaps you’ll use your home office for a little writing. Something meaningful like “Raising Children For Fun and Profit.”

Well. There’s always a fairly high probability that your horoscope will speak to you in a significant way (particularly sun sign horoscopes from the newspaper, and I can explain to you why this is so another time), but this week is just so on.

We’ve been in this house for nearly five months now and I still don’t have access to my home office because it’s stuffed full of boxes. The guest room and what will eventually be Simon’s room also have more than their fair share of crap in them. But my office is the one that’s making me crazy, because I have no place in this house that’s mine. The pens, paper, and scissors? They have to be stored up and out of reach in the kitchen, or else they disappear. I have nowhere to put my computer, so I’m still camped here at the end of the kitchen island, annoying both me and Darin. And the extras connected to my computer, like the Palm dock and the iPod dock? Fuhgeddabouddit.

We have no pictures up and we still have boxes everywhere. We have a 2800-sq.ft. house and we’re crowded into about half of it.

And some people we know are having their housewarming today. They moved in three or four weeks ago. True, they only moved about ten miles.

We’ll probably have our housewarming right around Simon’s second birthday. He’s only 17 months now. Is that enough time to finish getting this place in shape, do you think?

I picked up the mail at the PO Box today and discovered within 1)a property tax bill…for the house in Los Angeles that we reportedly don’t own any more and 2)a final Department of Water and Power bill for $767…which claims that 54 KWH and 532 gallons of water were being used per day.

No, no one was in the house. No, the A/C was not running full-blast during the four months we’ve been gone from there.

Of course, I cannot get through to the Property Tax office (the voicemail is set on “busy”) and I’ve been on hold at the DWP for over an hour now.

We don’t even have a printer so I can print out polite, but firm, letters to the appropriate departments.

Pardon me while I throw up.