In the middle of the night early Monday, I woke up sweating. The house was nearing 80° F, but the air conditioning hadn’t kicked on yet. We installed a new thermostat in November, but it being about 2 AM, lighting and exhaustion limited my options to investigate. I had the HVAC run its fan, and turned on all the ceiling fans overnight to keep things tolerable. Monday and Tuesday had work and other obligations, but fortunately the temperature came down by the first afternoon, so I was free to delay immediately fixing it for the moment.
Coming home on Tuesday afternoon, I found the garage open. Did I forget to close it when I left for work in the morning? I hit the remote in the car. The garage door started to lower, until the right side locked about a quarter of the way down, causing the entire thing to go back up. Going in to inspect this potentially fatal machine, I discovered the one cable had unspooled. This had happened once before, about ten years earlier, and wasn’t terribly expensive to hire someone to fix. Then Wednesday morning we had an unexpected drop in temperature, and it snowed sideways for the next hour.
The wild temperature swing in March isn’t unusual here. Even a blizzard crashing onto the scene isn’t unheard of. But for both the extreme heat and the extreme cold to coincide with not one, but two machines which specifically protect the house from inclement weather suddenly breaking down within days of each other. Utterly stupid mundanity.