Yesterday, Katie and I did a massively thorough cleaning of the house. Thorough to the point where I was up on a ladder cleaning the Golden Gate picture frames and the high windows and soffet in our living room as well as the arced window and chandelier lamp in our entryway. I was taking care of dust and grime that hadn't been touched in a while.

That's about the only thing I can think of that we did that might have caused this deep-chest cough that I now have. It's a cough that I was able to control relatively decently during the day with liquids. It seemed entirely manageable when we went to see Easy A with my brother and SiL. I think I may have only coughed once or twice during the entire movie.

That evening was a different matter altogether. Katie and I were watching football and reading books in bed and my cough came back full force. So I took some allergy meds, a swig of Delsym (a cough suppressant), and located a blister pack of Chloraseptic. Again, I seemed to get it under control.

Then came 3 a.m., and one of my worst coughing fits ever. It wasn't even coughing that woke me up. I'd had another one of my ridiculously vivid dreams. It was very cool and one whose storyline continued in my head even as I lay in bed awake. I had to get this thing written down, I had absolutely no desire to forget it whatsoever. So I made the damn-fool mistake of getting up and heading to the bathroom where I could sit and jot down what I remembered from my dream without waking Katie.

Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

The shift from prone to upright position clearly knocked everything loose in my lungs and throat and the coughing began again in full force.

Now, not only was I unable to get back to sleep because of my coughing (and the fact that my brain was continuing to mentally write the dream I had), but it was also keeping Katie awake.

And thus the story of why I'm in the living room posting to my blog at 4 a.m.

This should make for a fine day of work, don'cha think?

There is no question in my mind that the Chicago Bears lost the season opener to the Detroit Lions. It may be marked down as a Bears' win in the record books, but it just wasn't. Calvin Johnson's last-second reception in the endzone, I don't care what the rulebook says, was a touchdown. That rule is bunk and I can't believe the refs enforced it in good conscience.

However, this week, the Bears beat the Dallas Cowboys fair and square and it felt sooooo good. (Sorry Ren!)

I don't much like the Cowboys. And, although I can say the feeling of "hate" that I once felt for them has abated to the point where I believe I can actually respect them as a team and I do like several individual players, it still feels nice to have that one team that I can think of as "the enemy." Someone to point at and snarl as though I were the evil monkey in Chris' closet in The Family Guy.

Why the animosity? I don't really know why. It's not like they did something to me personally. I cannot nail it down to a certain event. Not like when Duke's Christian Laettner dropped in that buzzer beater against my Kentucky Wildcats in the 1992 NCAA Tournament (I won't even get into his stepping habits).

Perhaps it's less an event and more of an attitude that disgusted me about the Cowboys. I just didn't like the triumvirate of evil that was Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and, especially, Michael Irvin. I couldn't stand the arrogance of that team. Yes, they won. They were a great team. They were, supposedly, "America's Team" (clearly not my America), but I hated them all the same.

I have my "evil" teams in most sports leagues. Obviously the Duke Blue Devils in NCAA Basketball. The Iowa Hawkeyes in NCAA Football. The Atlanta Braves in the MLB. The Detroit Pistons in the NBA. The Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL. Some with reason, some without.

But there is no team I hated more during their heyday than the Cowboys.

So yesterday's win felt good. Very good.

Again... sorry, Ren.