The common cold, a winter malady I suffer just once every three or four years, brings out the worst in me. My best, mind you, is most people’s worst. I find myself wondering why I feel even more negative than usual. Minor annoyances take on major
significance: why do BOTH supermarkets in Hood River sell only rock-hard and bright green bananas? Why are so many people unable to drive without tail-gating the car in front, which is always me? Why do radio hosts get away with hundreds of “ums” and “ahs” and repetitive space-fillers?
When EVERYTHING I find is WRONG, I know I am coming down with a cold. The sneezes come first. I can’t even finish a sneeze before the next one is escaping. My nose is running like Multnomah Falls. In my mind, I canvas my recent acquaintances: was it that waiter who had so many facial piercings I thought he had fallen into a fishing tackle box? Was it the snooty technician at the hospital who kept calling me “Honey,” as she proceeded to drill four test holes before finding a vein with artesian qualities? Or, was it that naughty boy in that eighth grade class I covered last week, the one who kept asking if I ever smiled?
In short, I want to know who passed this nasty bug to me, so I can curse them with the breath of a thousand camels. May their carpets be over-run with fleas from those camels. May their morning tea taste like burning camel dung and linger on their palates like wet camel fur. 
Nasty. You get the picture.
After about twenty-four hours in revenge mode, I start the cure. The cure involves lots of sleep, Echinacea extract, home made chicken soup, and tea. Lots of tea. This time, I decided to try the Sencha Naturals Green Tea + C. It is an instant drink made primarily of matcha tea, some natural vitamin C, antioxidants, and a blend of herbals including lemon and ginger. There is a wee bit of natural sodium bicarbonate to give it a pleasant fizz.
Remarkable stuff, I felt my bronchial passages relax as I sipped. Delicious and soothing, the first cup went down easy. The second cup, even easier. I generally avoid matcha because it tastes too . . . green. But this has a lovely whiff of citrus and a sensation of fizz that hits the palate like a satisfied sigh. Yesssssss.
To that eighth grade boy (who, like so many others these days has a surname as his first name): I AM SMILING.
MAIN IMAGE from Sencha Naturals IMAGE 1: IMAGE 2:
It seems like people are dropping like flies. Everyone has a cold or a stomach flu – so consider yourself lucky that you simply caught a cold. I was at the market yesterday and the man in front of me was telling the cashier that his wife was so ill with the flu that she ended up in the hospital for a few days. He also blamed her for infecting him with it.
I too LOVE Green Tea plus C. I LOVE that they’re not loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners. They taste great and they work to shorter your cold or, if taken early, to avoid catching one. I’m bringing a few packets with me when ever I travel by plane.
Glad you liked it, Regena! We drink it ourselves here in the Sencha office, and we’ve found that we like Citrus Ginger mixed with hot water, Dragonfruit with ice water, and the Original is nice either way. Hope you’re doing better, and that your colds become less & less common… :)
Just talked about this subject on our Facebook yesterday and this from Yahoo Health: Here’s something nice from Yahoo Health/2013: “When Canadian researchers added green tea to lab samples of the adenovirus (one of the bugs responsible for colds), they found that it stopped the virus from replicating. All the credit goes to EGCG, a chemical compound found in certain kinds of tea, but in the highest concentrations in green tea. Start pumping green tea into your bloodstream at the first sign of a cold and you should be able to stop the advance of the adenovirus. “It’s the difference between staying home for two or three days, and going to work and just sniffling a bit,” says Joseph M. Weber, Ph.D., the lead study author and a professor of microbiology at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.
P.S. Thanks for posting the link to Multnomah Falls..brings back many wonderful memories of dates in Portland as a young woman up there enjoying my first time away from home. I just love Portland!