It’s been raining and storming for the last few days, lots of lightning and brief power outages. But the rain today is kind of solid: little bits of ice in each splash.

There is a boil-water advisory for a lot of areas around Pittsburgh (not my neighborhood, however) and I assume it has to do with the flooding from the storms, bad water getting into places it shouldn’t have. I believe my water comes from a different county entirely from the Pittsburgh system.

It’s cold, so I’ve set up a humidifier to make the dry air breathable, especially for sleep. The stores love to sell these humidifiers but they don’t bother stocking the filters. It took 3 stores to find one, and that’s all they had, one.

Other water-related issues abound with this house. I have to deal with a mold smell coming from somewhere in the basement. I have a big bottle of Concrobium to spray if I find mold, but it’s hard to locate. Today maybe I’ll open the area where the sump pump is and check in the darkness there. I notice the moldy smell when the heat is turned on in the front of the house (which uses its own separate furnace) mostly when the basement hasn’t been aired out. I read a post by someone who found mold on a vent in his crawlspace that was being transmitted to the fresh air draw to his furnace. I don’t know if there’s a crawl space here, but there are many basement areas to check. Anyway, he used Concrobium, and said it solved the problem.

The raccoons have really gone crazy digging holes in my yard. But it’s late in the year to do much now. I noticed one rabbit when I walked last night, and I hope more of the small rabbit troop I’m used to seeing survived.

Indoors, I’ve been busy reading fiction submitted to the critiquing group I’m in (Critters.org). The main rule is to be diplomatic in your criticism. This is becoming more difficult, because it seems as if the “casual-oral” sort of language that Trump exemplifies has spread everywhere. People are more and more prone to fail to write in complete sentences, and their language is full of half-completed phrases, pronouns that can’t be matched up to anyone, and then suddenly they’ll throw in half a common adage — only half of it. I don’t know what their sentences mean, a lot of the time. As a result, I’m trying harder to write clearly myself.