Thermostat wars

Autumn has arrived. And with it comes that seasonal indicator that is as predictable as shortening daylight hours and piles of orange and golden leaves left ignored in my yard and driveway. Yes, I’m talking about fighting with my wife, Carissa, over where to set the thermostat.

A little context: I hate the mid-Atlantic summers. Mid-Atlantic summers are hot and sticky. Mid-Atlantic summers cause me to sweat through my shirt and keep my underwear perpetually damp (or moist if you prefer). Mid-Atlantic summers do not cool off at night. Mid-Atlantic summers have too many mosquitoes. Mid-Atlantic summers make me wonder why people choose to live in such an inhospitable hellhole. But I digress. Autumn has arrived and life is almost tolerable. The days are cool and crisp and the evenings even cooler and crisper. I love opening the windows at night and burrowing under a down comforter. I love the fresh smells and brisk breezes circulating through those open windows. I love a soft fleece shirt and warm slippers paired with a morning cup of coffee and the Washington Post. Autumn is nature’s apology to me for being such a miserable bitch all summer.

Yet even as I am invigorated by autumn’s arrival, the change in the season drains from Carissa of all sense of warmth and comfort. Autumn invites her to close up the house tight and wrap herself in a blanket and wait for winter. Autumn emboldens her to crank the thermostat to a temperature level in our home suitable for slow roasting the Thanksgiving turkey.

Thus begins our seasonal war of the thermostat.

According to the early Greek philosopher Aeschylus, the first casualty of war is the truth. And so it is. In the early days of our marriage, Carissa and I lived in studio apartment in the basement of an old house. We converted a small windowless storage room just off the bathroom into a bedroom by throwing a mattress on the floor. Despite its cozy dimensions, the room had an electrical baseboard heating unit along one wall. One autumn night while preparing for bed, Carissa felt cold so she secretly turned the thermostat on the unit to the maximum ninety degrees and promptly fell asleep. I fell asleep as well, for a few hours. Then I awoke soaked in my own sweat and nearly incoherent due to dehydration and/or heat stroke. I assumed I was dying. I had never been so hot. I stumbled out of bed and into a long cold shower and felt remarkably better. While I was in the shower, Carissa realized what had happened and reset the thermostat to a level where life was sustainable. She did not reveal her deception until much later in our marriage. For years I wondered what the hell had happened to me that night.

My offensives in the thermostat war have always been more direct. I’m usually the last one to bed and the first one up. In autumn evenings on my way to bed, I turn the furnace off and open windows. Carissa later wakes up, closes the windows and turns the furnace on and the thermostat up. The next morning I rise, start a pot of coffee, turn the thermostat off, open the windows, and dig through the leaves in the front yard for the morning paper. A short while later, Carissa rises, closes windows and cranks up thermostat. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thanks to technology, the thermostat wars have escalated, as I have discovered. A year or so ago, Carissa had one of those fancy WiFi-enabled thermostats installed in our home. From an app on her smart phone, she can control the temperature in our house from anywhere in the world. She can keep the house warm or cold (depending on the season) if we happened to be away on vacation, and then set it to a more comfortable level while at the airport on our way home. Like most gadgets, I am happy for the details of the fancy thermostat to remain a mystery to me and preserve my brain cells for other things. Like storing trivia and drinking whiskey. So long as Carissa or the kids are around, I’m able to enjoy the benefits of technology without troubling myself with figuring out how any of it works.

I failed to fully appreciate the consequences of my laisse faire approach to technology. It was one of our kids who finally reveled to me what was happening. I’m not telling parents anything new, but there is nobody in the world worse at keeping your secrets than your children. They are essentially little spies living in your home, conducting surveillance and gathering intelligence that they share with teachers, neighbors, relatives, and basically any adult they spend time with when you are not around.

The other night while putting my second-grader to bed, I agreed to lay with her with the lights out for a few minutes while she went to sleep. It was a cool and crisp evening and I opened one of her windows to let in the evening breeze. As we lay there in the dark, my daughter whispered that whenever mom sees me turn the thermostat down, she uses the app on her iPhone to turn it back up. Aeschylus may have lived in a mild Mediterranean climate in the days before iPhones and thermostat apps, but the dude knew his shit about war.

Yes, truth is the first casualty of war. Meanwhile, I'm sleeping with the enemy and depending on traitorous children for information. War is hell. Kind of like the Mid-Atlantic region in summer. I should probably download the app. Who am I kidding. I need to open a few windows in here and let in some fresh autumn air.