Tuesday night after I got up from watching tv with all three cats draped around the sofa near me, I realized it seemed much warmer than usual. Checking with my thermostat confirmed my dread. It was 80 degrees in the house.
The thermostat wouldn't start the air conditioner no matter what I did. During this time, Colby and Thimble acted like it wasn't at all warm, and were thundering up and down the hallway and behaving in general, like a bunch of silly kittens. Strange.
I called the emergency line for my air conditioning people, and within 15 minutes the on-call guy calls me back. Turns out it's Joel, who sold me the system in the first place. It's a medium-sized family run business, so it wasn't surprising he's also a fix-it guy.
Well, there's an update to the thermostat's software, which may or may not be the problem. I can contact my system from a phone app, and using that same connection I can give him access to troubleshoot it, but the system refused to acknowledge it. (Later, ironically, the website refreshed and informed me that I had to update the software before remote troubleshooting access would be possible.)
So he says, well, I don't live far from you, I can come over and see if I can fix it from there.
It's 9:30 by now. I usually am in bed by 9 at the latest, and Thimble is usually in his crate at that point as well. But I had tons of stuff at work, and I really didn't want to have to skip a day to take care of this, plus I didn't see my way toward letting the long-haired cats stay in a house that might hit 100 degrees without air conditioning. I'd probably have to take Thimble and Colby, at least, to somewhere that had air conditioning ... I'm sure my mom would have loved that request!
I said come on over. He gets there about fifteen minutes later, and Thimble is just fascinated. A visitor! A human visitor late at night! Not only is he getting to stay up late, but he's getting a new person to greet and investigate too.
Apricot was horrified and disappeared, I thought under the sofa. Colby was rather unimpressed with the whole situation and just wanted to go to bed, which he told us about, from the living room, with a few well placed complaining meows. (I had to remember that Colby's always been a little bit of a whiner.)
After fighting the thermostat for a while, Joel finally got it to recognize both the SD card and the update that was on it (at one point it recognized the existance of a card but not the contents). Once the update was performed, the thermostat performed beautifully, activating the air conditioning again and doing everything it was supposed to do. Unfortunately we'd had to factory-reset it, so all the schedules had to be put in again. Fortunately I'd had the common sense to take a picture of the schedules before he reset it, so I know what they are at least.
Joel left then, and we discovered that Apricot had hidden in the kitchen somehow, despite leaving the kitchen when Joel came in that door. So Joel got to see an orange cat streak past him, the most anybody gets to see of my poor scared kitty.
Apricot stayed under the sofa (for real this time) for the rest of the night, and did not want his good night kiss. He was apparently holding me responsible for his fright and wouldn't even come close enough to be petted like he usually does when he's hiding under there.
Thimble willingly went to bed (his crate), having been apparently worn out by the excitement. And Colby was just grateful that we were going to bed. The temperature in the house had risen to 82 by the time the air conditioning started up again, and it ran all night getting it back down to the night-time temperature of 73.
It seems just fine now, and by morning Apricot had forgiven me as well.
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