Ode to Technology

Aaron has been in Singapore and Malaysia this past week. He is coming home tonight (yea!). Anyway, he had to wake up for his flight last Monday at 5:30 am. After he left, he didn't turn off the alarm on his alarm clock. Well, he shut if off, but it was still set to go off at 5:30 the next morning - which it did. Now, I've done this before, so I wasn't annoyed. But, it was 5:30 am and since I was not familiar with this clock - which is over on his side of the bed, I couldn't figure out how to turn it off in the dark. So, I unplugged it. This is one of those strange alarm clocks that sets itself. You just plug it in, and away it goes, the numbers running until it magically stops at the correct time. Well, it almost has it's own brain because I was awoken the next morning to beeping at 5:30 am. I guess it has some feature that keeps is going EVEN IF IT IS UNPLUGGED. I manually turned off the alarm and resumed my 7:15 wakeup for the rest of the week.

Then, this morning, I awoke to a frigid house. I went to look at the thermostat. We have a nice programmable one that changes the temperature automatically for different days and times. It was blinking "low batt". Now, this is partially my fault because it has been blinking that intermittently with the regular display for a couple of weeks now. It was one of those things I was going to get to tomorrow. But now, it just said "low batt." I found some batteries, plugged it back in, and found out my house was about 56 degrees. Pretty good considering that it was 18 degrees outside. If the thermostat can't communicate with the furnace, it just doesn't come on.

So, all those things that make our life easier and better - fancy alarm clocks and programmable thermostats, just happened to make my life a little more difficult this week. But, I guess I shouldn't complain. Because technology does make my life easier, in ways that I probably don't even realize.