Allergies

Drove down to Eugene yesterday afternoon to pick up Ross from school. He has completed his first year of college and Anne and I are pleased. The Southern Willamette Valley, where the University of Oregon is located is known as the grass seed capital of the world. I suffer from hay fever, and grass is one of my prime enemies. So while we are loading the car, my nose is running faster and faster. I had just been to the allergist, and he had given me some samples, including some Singulair, so I took one. By the time we left, my nose had shaped up and was flying right. But then at three o'clock in the morning I wake up and cannot go back to sleep. It takes me 12 hours to get 7 hours of sleep. It is noon before I am feeling human. No more Singulair for me.

While I was wiling away those sleepless hours in the middle of the night, I came across a rerun of a NOVA program on PBS. They were talking about the epi-genome, something above the genome, that controls which genes get turned on and which ones don't. It seems that what you eat can have a big effect on this. Not only that, but what your parents ate, and your grandparents ate, can also affect which genes are active in your body. There is that saying "you are what you eat", well you are also what your parents and grandparents ate. This could explain a great many things, perhaps even allergies.

When I looked this up on the web I realized the PBS show isn't scheduled to air until next month, so I got to see it early. Whoo-hoo!

Note that "wiling" is a variation of "wile", not "while", which is what I thought until I tried to figure out how to spell it.