Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

I feel like my life must have gone off the rails somehow recently. I have an ear infection in both ears and I just spent about an hour of precious sleeping child time drawing schematics for a home-made thermostat. Those two things are not related, but they both contributed to one of those snap-into-focus-what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-my-life moments.

I’m not designing a thermostat that I would make and sell to other people (although that would be kind of awful in it’s own way); I’m working out the code and wiring for a home thermostat just for myself. To clarify, I have a working thermostat already. My hypothetical thermostat would probably work better than my existing thermostat, and I might save some money with it, but it will probably take a few dozen hours, and why on earth do I care?

There’s really nothing even remotely exciting about a thermostat. I think it’s literally just that I started thinking about how they work and realized I could probably make one myself and that was the end of it. It feels like inverted mad science: only seeking to know if I can do a thing, but never pausing to ask whether I should, but not for Frankensteinian ethical reasons, but because it’s kind of a waste of time.

It may be time for an agonizing reappraisal of how I spend my ever-shrinking free time before I start trying to improve my toaster.