This, That, and the Other

San Francisco has been unusually cool and wet this month. Daily high temperatures have sometimes not even reached the 50s and lows have occasionally dipped down to the upper 30s.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You folks in the Midwest and Northeast, with your polar vortexes and nor’easters and blizzards, are probably thinking I have a lot of nerve complaining about temperatures in the 40s and 50s. Fair enough. I get it. Please don’t hate me, okay?

One of the great things about living in San Francisco is the climate. It rarely gets into the 80s during the summer. In fact, we don’t even have air conditioning in our house. And in the winter, it almost never drops into the 30s. We do have a furnace, but hardly ever have to turn it on. If there’s a chill in the house, we fire up the gas fireplace for a little while to make it toasty.

Last night, when I went to bed, our bedroom felt a bit chillier than usual. I have this little ambient temperature gauge on the chest of drawers, and when I looked at it last night, it read 59.5°F.My wife was already in bed, so I joined her, pulled the quilt snuggly up to my neck, and went to sleep.

Now as everyone knows, temperatures usually reach their lowest just before dawn. That’s science. So I was kind of surprised when, at 6:30 this morning, I glanced at that temperature thingie and saw this:The ambient temperature in the bedroom was five degrees warmer than it was when I got in bed last night!

My wife was already in the kitchen when I joined her a few minutes later and I remarked that I was surprised at how much warmer our room was this morning than it was when I came to bed last night.

She looked at me and said, “Your body puts off a lot of heat at night and you sweat a lot. That’s why the sheets on your side of the bed are sort of yellowish.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s your body heat. Either that or you’re incontinent.”