Bruce, I suffer along with you on the allergy front, but I have to ask what is going on in October that has incited such allergy reactions? My allergies always happened in the spring when grasses started growing. What is out there causing this misery for you?
I was actually wondering the same thing while driving through some lovely countryside this morning. Not that the lovely countryside had a blessed thing to do with it. But I thought about where I was living, and in what years, when I've most been bothered by allergies -- and I don't think any of it was in California. Or anywhere in the western U.S. of A. (I've never spent time in the Pacific Northwest, so that might be a different matter.)
For me, it's mostly been right here in CT, and I believe the years we lived in Florida. So, an eastern thing. I thought about the seasons in LA, October in particular, and the one October that immediately came to mind was 1986 when I'd just moved back there from my year in the Chicago area. I was walking down Wilshire near Western, on a lunch hour, thinking, WOW, it's hot back here. (But, thankfully, dry...) And maybe that was during a Santa Ana because I remember a 101-plus degree day around that time, and that's what was causing the heat. But I don't recall it ever affecting me in an allergies kind of way -- whereas the various summer extremes here are murder...as are other times of year...