One of the many perils of working at home is not having anyone to blame but yourself when the atmosphere in the office goes completely haywire.

I found my office this morning in a sad state. A thick fog rolled in while we were asleep last night and burned off quickly as the sun arose this morning. I left some small fans in my window from yesterday, since it was cooler outside than inside (why does this happen??), and all last night they pumped thick, foggy air into my little office.

I suppose that the surface of my mouse was particularly cool, because the fog condensed on it enough to leave a puddle on my mouse pad. It soaked through. At first I thought that perhaps the cats had finally gotten in more than a warning shot, and they’d have to be put down, but it doesn’t smell like cat pee. Unless someone actually spilled something on my mousepad underneath the mouse, I’m not sure how else this could have happened.

Other surfaces have that sticky dampness that accompanies high humidity and overabundance of dust. I’ve wiped everything with some cleaner and paper towels, but the room still has an uncomfortable humidity to it that I have no idea how to evacuate.

Worse, the cats have been in the office. The planter with the pepper plants in it is a great natural height for them to look out the window. I frequently shoo them away from the planter, because they like to sit in the dirt and watch birds, with the attending excitement. This leads to dirt from the planter covering my office floor. This is particularly the case when I have the windows open, because the outdoor smell draws the cats, and the added sound of the birds is much more attractive than merely looking at them through the front door glass.

So along with the wetness on raised surfaces, I have topsoil covering the floor. Thankfully, the cats have left the pepper plants unharmed. In prior years, I’ve had to discard plants that they’ve broken in half in their excitement to commune with the fauna outside my windows.

What would make my office more temperate and solve some of these issues is air conditioning. The air vent comes up in the floor of my office, in the far corner. Not much comes out of it. If the environment was a little more temperature-controlled, I wouldn’t have this sort of problem. I’ll just have to be more careful leaving the window open in the future.