My house seems to do a good job in keeping moisture out.  Perhaps too good a job.  I’d been noticing a lot of static electricity lately, to the point where I could hear the crackling as I was petting the dog.  The last straw came this weekend when I went to adjust the thermostat and got a huge shock.  I have a touch-screen programmable thermostat.  The discharge caused the screen to go completely blank.  I thought that I’d killed it, but fortunately it recovered, although it lost all its settings (and the thing is a royal pain to program, since you have to adjust the temperatures for four time periods for each day of the week; i.e. 28 individual settings). 

I immediately sat down with the laptop (after grounding myself to a metal table ) and ordered a great big humidifier.  Hopefully that will put an end to the constant shocks the dog and I have been enduring.