My ex-father-in-law is a heating and air conditioning man. He also does a ton of other repair work, which is handy if I ever need something fixed. He works inexpensively and comes quickly. It's fabulous. I had decided to get a programmable thermostat installed at my house and he made me a deal that he would install it really cheaply if I'd do the programming, since he hates that part. No prob, I thought. How hard can it be?

Well, it turns out it's not hard at all to program a programmable thermostat, if you're clearly paying attention to the directions and understand the difference between a conventional 1 heat 1 cool system and what I have, which is an electric heat pump. That's 2 heat, one cool. I was unaware, even though my ex-FIL did tell me that while I was in the middle of programming the thermostat. See, it helps if you actually listen.

After 24 hours of no heat during a miserably cold late-winter snowstorm, it was 55 degrees in my house and I called my husband sobbing and insisted he come home and make it work. He breezed in and within 5 minutes, had the heat working. "Sometimes," he said, "You need a man's touch." And as much as I wanted to punch him in the nose and tell him he was wrong, it did take him to fix it.

My consolation is that the kids were all too busy shivering under 50 blankets to bug him while he was doing it, not like when I was programming it and had kids, dogs, and cats all running around everywhere. Sigh.

Photo: Honeywell