We had a humidex installed last week. It’s a machine that for a small fortune is meant to save me from ever having to wipe our windows free of moisture in the winter and waste a perfectly good $10 towel and five minutes of my time. I guess when I put it that way, it may not have been the greatest investment.

It takes on the form of a white high school locker with a series of computerized codes that will have to be added to that list of things I will need to eventually learn should anything ever happen to Greg. I guess I just didn’t think the thing that could happen to him would involve being a human guinea pig in a home cryogenics experiment.

The first night, I was sceptical and could not foresee how this locker was going to do a better job at sucking moisture from the sills than my trusty golf towel but decided to give it a chance.

By the second day, I felt like our house was a food saver, we were the meat and the locker was the hose sucking any chance of being able to produce enough saliva to swallow ever again.

My chapped hands are more raw than ever, my throat is parched and I suspect if I left a bowl of apricots on the counter, I would have fruit leather by morning.

The plants are drooping, I have had no use for my salad spinner, the kids are choking back silent tears, I stand in the shower expecting to get wet and the shoots seem to vanish into thin air.

While wiping the windows was indeed an inconvenience, it hardly warranted five severe cases of dry-mouth and four cases of chapstick.

Greg better walk me through that rather lengthy list before one of us dries up completely. If I were in charge of said gadget, I’d be apt to set it on reverse and a tsunami would wash the house downstream.

On an unrelated note, I am no longer retaining water.