I spent the week of March 12 to 17 in Seattle at the Microsoft MVP Summit. It was a wonderful trip and someday I will get the pictures and a couple of movies posted. For now, I want to talk about coming home.

I love Seattle. I love the Summit. I hate coming home from Seattle. Every Summit, I get a cold and cough on the trip home. It could be that my body just loves the other MVPs so much that it doesn’t want to go back to real life, or it could be that the weather change is just too drastic.

No matter what causes it, I have fought the lung problems for many years. This time, it knocked me out for a week. Last week, I wrote three blog posts. I never posted them, thankfully, but I wrote them. I was pretty out of it. I am an asthmatic, so anytime my lungs get upset my life goes downhill. I have tried more tricks, pills, soothers, and test products than I care to count. This time was no different.

I found a new product that helped me survive the coughing nights. It’s called ShowerSoothers and it is made by SudaCare. ShowerSoothers are tablets that you drop in the running hot water of your shower and they turn your bathroom into a haven of great smells for your lungs. Well, that’s the idea anyway. The regular ShowerSoothers have been out for a while. They are menthol scented. Blech - just what I need - to step out of the shower and smell like a cough drop.

This time, I picked up a box of Vanilla Mint tablets. These have the Kathy seal of approval. Same menthol and eucalyptus vapors, with a strong vanilla/mint scent. Step out of that shower and you are calm, cool and not coughing. Ah… What a relief!

The soothers aren’t medicated, and they don’t relieve the cough for long periods, but they do a good job of comforting you when the cough is bad and all you want to do is breathe.