A New Habit Saves the Day

My usual procedure when I have trouble falling back to sleep in the middle of the night is to get up and begin my day. But in February there was one week when my day began at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. three times. I was totally useless after the third "early" rising.

So I decided I had to handle this differently. Now, when I know I'll toss and turn for some time, I get up and go downstairs to the spare bedroom. There I can toss and turn without disturbing Jim's sleep, and usually manage to fall back to sleep after an hour or so.

One night this week I went downstairs around 2 a.m. and noticed that the doors to the solar space were still closed. Here's a picture of the solar space with some of the many plants growing there. This space has no heating except what it receives from the sun during the day, and on very cold nights, what comes from having the doors to the inside open. With night-time temperatures dipping to -28ºC this week, it's very important to heat this space overnight, so I was very surprised to find the doors closed.

I went upstairs and asked Jim about it. What a scare that was for him! He came down and opened both doors and turned the furnace up quite high.

The temperature next to the windows was right at 0ºC, and if we hadn't discovered this problem, most of these plants would have frozen by morning.

How thankful he was!!! And I was glad that my new habit of trying to sleep downstairs had let us discover the closed doors before it was too late.