Thermostat Troubles

Don’t you just hate those freezing cold nights when you wear your warmest flannel pajamas and thickest socks and hurry into bed but are still surprised by the smack of cold that comes off the sheets, so you pull the blankets up to your chin, even that one at the foot of the bed—you yank that up too and tuck the blankets really close to the outline of your body like your grandmother used to do when she tucked you in as a kid and you lie really still and hope this little cocoon you’ve created will somehow become a terrarium by way of your body heat radiating off you while being trapped within the confines of your blanket cocoon and you’re sure you’re gonna be toasty warm real soon, but that doesn’t happen—you’re freezing your ass off and you can’t sleep to save your soul and you think about your furnace and the heat, like where the hell is it? and how is it possible that the thermostat (set by you—to the same temperature every night) does not produce the same amount of heat every night and why tonight it is nose-nipping cold, but you have no answer for this, and somehow by the grace of God you finally fall asleep probably because your body is so exhausted by having worked itself up in a frenzy trying to keep warm that you pass out—and you sleep for  a while but don’t know for how long, all you do know is that when you wake it’s the middle of the night and you are in a panic because you’re practically drowning in a sea of your own sweat since it’s so Goddamn sweltering hot in your bedroom that you can’t strip your flannels off fast enough, and thank goodness the fifty pounds of blankets have been dumped in a mountain to the floor along with the bottoms of your flannels, and now you’re so desperate to get the wool socks off but you’re loathe to move too much at this point because you have a history of waking in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back to sleep so you promise yourself you will remove the socks without fully waking, and in order to do this you stay very still, or as still as you can, and you use the big toe of your left foot to remove the sock on your right foot and this goes pretty well which makes you happy, but you’re careful to not get too excited because this might wake you up entirely so you keep the celebrating to a minimum while you now use the big toe of your right foot to remove the sock on your left foot but as your right leg is in a chicken wing formation you get a Charley horse in your toe—if that’s even possible—and then another one in the back of the thigh of the chicken winged leg—which hurts like hell, but you can’t give in to it  because half of your body is still asleep and you must keep it that way, so you try to handle the pain as best you can without making too much of a fuss, so you sort of rock the bent knee of that leg up and down, a bobbing action really, and you clench your teeth and breath heavily through your clamped bite which creates a “chee, chee” sound—this helps with the pain and is quiet enough not to wake the other half of you and then out of the dark night you hear, “What the heck are you doing?” It’s your husband. You can’t believe he would brazenly speak out in the night like that, jeopardizing you’re attempt to stay in a partial slumber. To this you reply, “Shh! Stop talking, you’re gonna wake the other half of me that’s still asleep!” Silence. Phew, that was close. Then your husband says, “Well, if that’s the case, I hope it’s the sane half.”