Pat Carpenter

The weather in Austin, Dallas, Houston and the rest of Texas is already starting to cool down. This means, for many individuals, the stress of the holiday season is almost upon them. When your stress peaks, it's hard to think, let alone act. These steps can help you keep normal holiday depression at bay:

Pfizer can't be happy. Its patent on the best-selling drug in the world, Lipitor, expires in 2011, which doesn't give the pharmaceutical giant much time to figure out how to compensate for the billions of dollars in sales that will be lost when it happens, courtesy of generic companies reproducing the medicine's active ingredients.

If you've ever had the sneaking suspicion hospitals aren't doing all they can to prevent infections, you may be right. According to three studies published in the American Journal of Medical Quality, most hospital-acquired, or nosocomial infections, arise as a result of hospital procedures, not from the level of patients' illness.

"Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink," or so the saying goes. Texas knows this well, with large swaths subject to extreme heat and drought inland, and non-potable salt water down in the Gulf. There may be water, but no one can drink it without treating it first.

For many self-employed individuals in Dallas, Houston and elsewhere in Texas, health insurance is the last thing they can afford. Those who work for themselves often say, "I can't afford to get sick. Period." The term "sick days" isn't even something that crosses their minds, let alone enters their vocabularies.

A triathlon is a grueling competition that includes running, biking and swimming distances. The races can vary in distances, with the shorter Tinman, which includes a .62 mile swim, 28.6 mile bike race and a 6.2 mile run, to the aptly named Ironman, which includes a 2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike race and running a marathon - approximately 26 miles.

Mercury is poisonous, yet it's a critical part of most compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), the kind that environmentalists and some governments are pushing as a new way to cut energy consumption.

If you lose your job anywhere in the US, including Texas, one of the many questions you'll have is: "Will I lose my health coverage, too?"