Jodi has been feeling under the weather for the past two days — seems somehow or another, she’s picked up a nasty cold. I’m the usual transmitter of illnesses to our household, being that I work in a rather large office environment with, on average, eighty people present on any given day. My workplace is therefore a rather large illness incubation vector. However, I have as yet to develop any symptoms myself, outside the lingering could-be-seasonal-allergies I’ve had for the past two months. Well, aside from a throat tickle that, I swear, *just* started, and I’m hoping is psychosomatic.

It might therefore have been transmitted somehow else, considering Opal is apparently not feeling all that healthy herself today. She and Jen have been out of the house occasionally, but as far as I know, human contact has been relatively limited and honestly, we’ve been cooping ourselves up lately (Jodi and I in our office, they in their room), so I don’t know how we could have transmitted anything to one another. Who knows? Bacteria and viruses are nasty little bits of self-replicating life, and if anything has dominion over this planet, it’s them, not us.

I’ve always used Vicks Vapo-rub for colds — a greasy eucalyptus and camphor salve that’ll fill a room with menthol smell so thick you have to get a running start to get through the door. I don’t know how effective the stuff is empirically, but the powerful smell does open your nasal passages. Likewise, I’ve never known why they suggest you directly apply it to your chest, neck or shoulders, if its primary action is to assault your sinuses. We had a small jar of it left from my last cold, and Jodi asked to make use of it, so I got it out for her — and after she’d applied it, she saw that it expired September 2008. Jodi’s the type to throw stuff out the day after it’s expired, regardless of whether it even makes sense for the product in question to have an expiry date at all, whereas I’m the type to check to see if something still looks and smells okay, and have been known to eat things well past their expiration date, with no major ill effects… so far. This might turn out to be a selection criterion and I might succumb to the harsh reality of natural selection, keeping my willing-to-eat-anything genes from propagating beyond myself.

Anyway, to assuage her fears, I Googled “vicks expiration” and the following page came up on Yahoo Answers:

Using expired (year 1996) Vicks Vaporub?

According to the obviously-not-doctors answering this, as long as there’s no rash resultant from it, it’s probably still fine. What do you guys think?