I gawda code.
It started in my sinuses. Crawled up my nose like Donald Trump, then just sat there, stuffier than Downton Abbey, more painful than Canada's loss at the world juniors.
Eventually my cold got bored, reached down and began scraping my throat with a wire brush until everything I ate proved harder to swallow than the logic behind U.S. gun laws.
So I lay on the couch moaning in harmony with the dog, or what the dog would have been moaning like were the dog not dead. Lucky dog.
That's when I began to suspect, as usual, that I had contracted something more dire than a common cold.
"I think 'm dying," I told my wife.
"You poor thing," she said, though the congestion in my head made it sound like "Is your insurance paid up?"
Fortunately, my unquenchable will to live somehow pulled me back from the edge of the Great Beyond and gave me the strength to drive to the store to reload: Aspirin, Kleenex, lozenges, margarita mix....
Not usually being a mid-day shopper, I was surprised to see the aisles packed: "Who are all these people?"
"Retirees," she replied.
We passed a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, his bony white legs poking down from his Lord Baden-Powell Memorial Shorts.
He appeared to be riding a chicken.
Others shivered in similar attire.
"Why are they dressed that way?" I asked.
"Snowbirds," she said. "They always dress like that in January. Except this year the low dollar is keeping them from going to Arizona."
Right, the low dollar. That would explain the sign on the California-grown produce: "Broccoli, $6 a pound. Ask us about our layaway plan. Low monthly payments OAC."
The Canadian dollar dipped below 70 cents last week. Not as low as when it bottomed out at 61.79 cents in January 2002, but still the lowest since 2003.
Every time we turn on the TV we see someone enthusing that this is Good News. Exporters are thrilled.
The film industry is excited, as the languishing loonie means more U.S. productions shifting here (in Hollywood, they joke that you can tell a Vancouver-made movie from the Starbucks in the background of every shot).
The tourism sector is buoyant, as not only does the exchange rate mean more Americans coming to B.C., but more Canadians, too.
In 2014, TD Economics released a study showing that while spending by Canadians visiting the U.S. had hit $22.3 billion the previous year - doubling what we spent south of the line a decade earlier - that amount was expected to drop by $4.5 billion due to the worsening exchange rate, which was then around 90 cents.
That's a lot of cross-border shopping.
Remember how Canadian merchants squirmed in 2011, when the loonie soared past par? The long, long border line-ups coming back from the States looked like a refugee crisis, or at least what a crisis would look like if the refugees all shopped at J.C. Penney and Nordstrom.
It can work both ways, though, depending on which way the pendulum is swinging. After 9/11, when our dollar was at its weakest and American anxiety at its highest, our neighbours snapped up cheap - to them - property in the lovely, leafy, safe Gulf Islands. After the U.S. sub-prime meltdown, it was Canadian snowbirds' turn to buy winter homes in the southern desert.
Indeed, that TD report estimated 500,000 snowbirds spend significant time in the U.S. each year.
Think of that: 500,000 Canadians - basically the population of B.C. east and north of Hope - fleeing south every winter to escape the darkness/cold/Don Cherry.
Except now, with the loonie limping, a lot of those snowbirds have found themselves once again frozen in the ice - and, worse, they appear to have lost their naturally protective down.
You could see them in the grocery store in their golf visors and We're Spending Our Grandchildren's Inheritance T-shirts, fingering the $40 tomatoes and searching futilely for the Pabst beer cooler.
"Aww," she said. "They're trembling."
"Just wait," I said, "until they're reacquainted with the traditional Canadian winter cold."
