I’m in our fifties and my dad has been gone more than 2 years now.
Still, there are these interesting characteristics that I see in myself that remind me of him.
One of those times I catch it is when I get on our kids about the heating and cooling usage in our home. I get entirely frustrated when I find our kids yanking around the control unit. Coming home that has been cooled to the low 68’s all day when it’s a hundred degrees outside can make me crazy. When I try to get across to our kids just how wasteful that is, they tend to look at me as though I’m just nuts. To them, heating and cooling is some sort of preordained right and not a privilege we get to enjoy. This too makes me a bit nuts because having children who think they are entitled to stuff that is entirely a privilege is concerning. It entirely wasn’t that way for me when I was growing up in my dad’s house. This was a guy that grew up without any sort of residential HVAC. There was a wood stove in the wintertime for heating and all the breeze you could get from the air conditioner in the summer. So the fact that our home had quality heating and air with a residential heating and A/C plan was a genuinely large deal to him. That person was entirely on top of where the control component setting was. You moved the control component at your peril. Shoot, I don’t even think my mom moved the control component much. That’s certainly a far cry from where I am with my kids. Perhaps I should go old school dad on them plus put the fear of God in them when it comes to the control unit.