Seattle is wet. I know, this is a shocking piece of information, especially if you’re not one of the hundred people who heard I was moving here and said “doesn’t it rain all the time?” Well yeah, but only kind of. It’s not really a driving rain or storm situation. While it does rain like this occasionally and only in short bursts, it’s more of a constant drizzle mist, and honestly, we do get about 1.5-2.5 nice days a week.

Because it drizzle-mists the majority of the time, things like the ground are pretty much always wet. And, if you don’t have a dryer or a heater to blast warm air on something, the bottoms of your jeans are always wet. Your shoes are always wet. Your carpet is always wet. A lot of things are always wet, especially if part of your house is below the ground, especially especially if that part of your house was probably slapped together using spare parts and not a single level.

The back of our house – the bathroom, part of the kitchen, and our bedroom – is that part of the house. Mainly the bathroom, which is so oddly shaped and so prone to weird leaks and constant moisture that I’ve been cleaning it with anti-mold chemicals once a week and have to keep towels stuffed behind the toilet (condensation, at least the droplets The Cat doesn’t lick off the toilet tank) and along the exterior wall (where the stack moves up out of the house instead of down and away like, oh, every commonly accepted engineering concept since the fucking Roman Empire). The moisture-mold situation has become so insidious that I check the surfaces every time I go in there, because if I don’t, huge black mold blossoms the size of an adult fist can sprout in days. Not only is that gross, but it seems dangerous for Graham’s allergies. It’s also so common here that it’s not really a landlord concern. Not just for us, but for anybody we know.

I noticed another outbreak today, one I didn’t catch before, because for some reason, I assumed the wall behind the bathroom sink cabinet was concrete? It’s not concrete, it’s just a white wall mottled with so much mold that it looks like rough concrete. Just…shudder, it’s okay. I’ll wait.

So today I get to get everything out of there and blast the wall with the mold killer-bleach-mold killer combination (again), which means that maybe my sinuses will finally clear up/burn themselves out, and my fingers will smell like bleach all day. Then I get to check the other windowsills in the house. Again.

It’s not that I mind the occasional cleaning, but the obsessive level of checking I’m doing for both moisture and mold makes me feel like I’m re-enacting a PNW version of The Yellow Wallpaper.