Nearly every day my mom reports to me that she has not gotten enough sleep. She’s consistently talking about her insomnia and the difficulty that she has going to bed every evening. Apparently, she lies awake for hours and even once she falls asleep she struggles to stay asleep. I have been telling her for months that she needs to watch her caffeine intake and start settling down for bed much earlier than she could possibly imagine; Unluckyly, I get the sense that she is ignoring my advice and continuing to make her life annoyed. I caught her red-handed the other day and realized that she was leveraging the central cooling system to hide her obsession with coffee. This necessity for caffeine was essentially shooting her in the foot every evening, yet she was trying to hide the habit through the A/C unit. I thought it was different that my mom kept changing the thermostat lower and lower when the indoor air temperature already seems pretty cool and fresh to me. Still, I noticed that she was modifying the indoor air quality control settings on a official basis before scampering off to the home office. Yesterday I happened to walk into the home office behind her and found her making a brand new cup of tea as the central cooling device kicked into gear. She timed the use of her little Keurig equipment to line up with the air conditioning unit as it began pumping ice frosty air through the vents. The sound of the A/C system effectively drowned out the loud hum of the tiny tea maker. At the same time, the indoor air circulated so that her tea fumes were hastily sucked up into the air return vent and filtered out from our breathing air. When I caught her red handed, I simply smiled and motioned like I was peacefully asleep.
