All Wet

My alarm serenaded me early this morning. I planned to run a few miles before school—something I hope to be disciplined to maintain throughout the school year.

I purchased a dehumidifier for my room nearly a month ago. My bedroom is sort of a self-contained area, attached to a private bathroom. The bathroom has a ventilation fan, but other than that, it provides no pathway for moisture to escape, except for into my bedroom. Shortly after moving into my room at the start of 2006, I had major problems with mold attacking both closets in my bedroom, largely due to lingering moisture. The dehumidifier was part of my strategy for helping that not to happen again.

Last night I picked out clothes to wear and laid them near my dehumidifier. This morning, shortly after the “Flight of the Bumblebee” jumpstarted my day in all its cheesy-cell-phone-ring-midi-file glory, I got up, walked over to the clothes I would wear during my run, and planted my sock-swaddled foot smack into a puddle.

This was not good. The goal of a dehumidifier is to remove the moisture from my room and collect it into the pan that accompanied it and its $250 price tag. The dehumidifier should most definitely NOT be quaffing water out of the air and spewing it back onto my floor. My dehumidifier had been very, very naughty. I gave it a timeout, and it seems to have learned its lesson.

So I went outside and discovered that a cloud had engulfed the compound overnight. The fog limited visibility to perhaps half a football field. I know, because I ran around our football field, and I could only see about half of it.

What really made me misty today, though, was the untimely death of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter”, who had an ill-fated encounter with a stingray during the filming of an ocean documentary.

At the end of the day I did laundry, while also instigating a flurry of activity in my kitchen. I made pasta for myself and a cake to share with others. (Yes, men can occasionally multi-task.) I started my load of wash first. By the time to take the cake out of the oven, I figured my clothes would be ready to throw in the dryer. Nope. The washer got stuck in the soak cycle. I changed washers. When I returned to put my laundry in the dryer, the driers were all full, leaving my clothes—fitting, for this day—all wet.