I got it!

Whatever it is that's going around that is. My wretched child seems to have brought it home with him.

It's a kind of low-grade miserable. It not exactly painful, and the sinus congestion isn't all that severe. It's just aches all over and extreme fatigue. I've been sleeping much of the day.

It's also not bad enough to make me stay in bed without feeling guilty. I have dragged myself out and around to do some stories, as I will today.

You didn't know there's such a thing as "journalism macho," did you?

What it actually feels like is the flu, just not so bad. And that's strange because we all got the flu vaccine.

I've heard reports of people getting it anyway. It could be a different strain than the vaccine guards against, or it may be that the vaccine gives only partial protection to some, insuring we get only a mild case.

I wonder though, we tend to label everything we get according to symptoms we are familiar with. We have a "cold" which is really not a single virus but a group of rhinoviruses, (That's doctor-talk for "viruses that like to live in your nose.") Doctors talk about "flu-like symptoms."

I suppose they can't pin down and analyze ever virus that comes along, if it only makes people miserable and doesn't kill anybody, or at least not too many people. There's probably just a lot of the nasty little things that come and go, so we just shrug and say, "flu" or something.