Stupid Allergies

Today is the first day since I started this new job that my allergies have been affected (or is it effected) by my workplace environment. I work with old, dusty, dirty books and papers and I'm not usually bothered. But today was bad. We had a nice older gentleman come to the library to do an appraisal of a collection of about 1,500 books. They are all in my office, but they usually just sit on the shelf. Today he was pulling them off the shelf, opening them (shocking!) and doing other things to distribute the dust. We're also doing a project where we are "weeding" the old, unused items in the library collection to make room for newer stuff. My part of the project is to go through each one and change the entry in the catalog so that it doesn't show up anymore. These books are also old and dusty (because of the lack of use) and I'm now surrounded by them. All these dust carriers coupled with the spring weather junk in the air outside means that my allergies were acting up all day.
And it was bad...pathetic bad. I had a runny nose all day, and an intermittent, annoying cough. And my right eye was irritated and watery. Not both eyes, just my right eye, which means, half the day I looked like I was crying because my eye was watering and I was sniffling and the rest of the day I was unintentionally winking/blinking at the book appraiser. I really hope he doesn't get the wrong idea.
It got a little bit better after I went home and took my contacts out, but I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. I'm going to have to schedule breaks every hour to leave my office and stand somewhere with better air quality for a while. The bright side in this situation is that my apartment is awesome and clean so that's not adding to the problem like my old place did.
Ah well...I guess it's the price I pay for an awesome job.