One of the things Ann mentioned in passing on Saturday was that her husband was not a morning person and sometimes you just stayed a little out of his way first thing till he cheered up and became his normal self.

“So that’s where you get it from,” with a wry smile from my husband: clearly it was a family thing.

That said…

Last winter my sweetie went on a business trip to the East Coast.

And I found myself at midnight with a very very cold house and a thermostat that refused to play nice, to put it mildly.

We had installed a Nest, which was operated by our cellphones. It was paying attention to his–and his said he was 3000 miles away, so it had automatically gone into keep-the-pipes-from-freezing mode.

But I was right here! I grabbed my phone and Nest didn’t recognize it. Richard had set it up and I had no idea what username or password were supposed to be nor where I might look it up. Calling him at 3 am his time to ask probably wouldn’t go over well.

I’d okayed it, he’d bought it and installed it and I don’t remember so much as even seeing an owner’s manual. Wait, he’d mentioned something about you can squeeze the thermostat to change the temp. So I tried that.

One degree, two–and then suddenly it flipped way over to Cool and the air conditioning clicked on. NO! Fast, I tried to turn it back but no dice.

I tried again. At some point I did get the AC to at least turn off but other than that, it went into “a little child is playing with me” mode and went dark and refused all attempts to reason with it. No heat for you.

It is safe to say we were not friends at this point.

I gave it a few minutes and tried again. As I turned to heat it flipped to AC, I let go quick, and it went dark again.

It was not a happy night.

My husband, once he found out in the morning, overrode the control to go back to normal heating and saved my very tired day and said he’d figure out what was wrong with my phone’s app when he got home.

When the thing works it works so well you just never think about it. You don’t have to worry about resetting between the furnace and the air conditioning as seasons or temps change, it just takes care of it and most of the time it’s a huge improvement over the 25-year-old thing it replaced.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was getting hot (how?) and I knew I shouldn’t have had that chocolate that late.

At 2:45 am the room lit up: his Samsung tablet, which was supposed to be on night setting, was at full-blast-lightshow. Dang. I got up, walked around the bed, put it face down and half-covered where it still light-leaked, and got thwacked by my husband’s arm as he rolled over asleep.

And it was hot. This made no sense. It was 55 degrees outside. Yes it had been a warm day and we’d run the oven for a roast but that had been hours before and how on earth was he sleeping when it was this hot?

I went over to the Nest. Who on earth set it to that for nighttime? (Neither of us. C’est une mystere.)

At nearly 3:00 am the brain comes up with not-serious thoughts like, Did Nest conspire with the city? The state? to conserve power and turn everybody’s thermostats? What IS this? We paid tens of thousands from what would have been retirement funds to install solar, that’s OUR power and it’s clean energy and if we want it comfortable we earned it, give me my AC back! (I could have opened the window. I knew I would probably also have fallen on my husband’s head trying.)

Checked my phone. Nest still didn’t recognize me there, dang it. Went to the thermostat and re-enacted last winter, in reverse: squeeze, turn.

It went to heat. NO! Tried again. “A little child is playing with me” mode. Dark.

Time out.

Came back. Tried again. Got it down to 72, let go quick before it threw another hissy fit while I had it that good, hauled myself to bed directly below the vent as cool sweet cool began to blow down on my face.

But I did not sleep. My brain was writing scathing Amazon reviews of, I LOATHE this thing.

Dawn came. Well, that was a waste of a night. Thought about getting up but for the chest pains.

Now, I mentioned to my doctor Friday about the chest pains. They come and go and they’re generally an annoying but non-threatening part of being a lupus patient and he found nothing wrong, but when they’re persistently there at night or in the morning one really should mention it so I did, and now I have a cardiology appointment and a mildly worried husband. And they’re gone for the day and I’m fine now but it’s the middle of the afternoon and everything’s better then.

So. One of the first things I did was proclaim the tablet banished from the room if it did that again. (In normal life I might mention and we would talk it out and easily come to an agreement, nobody orders anyone around.) And I asked my nerd husband why he still hadn’t fixed that *%( iPhone.

Because it hadn’t updated–that’s why Nest hadn’t recognized it.

Oh. (Feeling very small.) And it didn’t update because I have too many pictures because I haven’t moved them to the computer because I want to still have all the baby pictures of the grandkids on it and I don’t want to sort through the thousands of not-grandkid ones. And you told me that when you got back from that trip.

Right.

Oh.

I tried to get up, did the dizzy thing in a grand way, went back to bed, and owned up to the accompanying chest pains. I was getting a little less growly but it was a process and there were things I’d wanted to do today but I was in no way driving a car this morning and if I don’t drive him to work well that’s that for the day–we only have the one.

And usually we like that. He gets to decompress at the end of the day and we get time together that’s just for us with nothing else calling at us.

By the time he left for work I was, I hope, closer to my normal daytime self. He was a peach and I wanted to live up to that no matter how tired I was.

A little after noon I checked Facebook to see if anyone needed to be wished a happy birthday.

And read this:

“It has been a long road with many unexpected bumps and turns, but I am glad I have had Alison Hyde by my side for the journey. Happy Anniversary to my sweetheart!”

It’s the 27th already!? It is?! Dang. Forgot. Busted. And loved. All at once. It’s been a life. Love you, too, honey, happy anniversary!