Sometimes people ask me about my most recent ex and I just have to shake my head. It’s not worth recounting all of the terrible ways that he tried to torture me. People generally want to believe that he was a good guy. No matter what I say, their response is something along the lines of “he seemed so nice!” That’s when I tell them about all of the stunts but he pulled while I was trying to move out of his house. I was simply trying to gather my belongings and get out of his way so we could move on, and he made sure that my blood would be boiling the entire time. Literally. I finally was given permission to get my stuff from his house in the middle of the burning hot southern summer. Where I live, the summer is marked with absurd heat and humidity day in and day out. You have to operate a central cooling system if you want to be safe or comfortable in your own home. Of course, when I arrived at his house to start packing my things on a particularly warm and muggy day, I found that he had disabled the thermostat so that I would be tortured with heat inside the house. He had locked the smart thermostat so I couldn’t adjust the indoor air quality in any way. Without having a cooling system chugging away to pump ice cold air into the house, it was at least 95 degrees in there. Thank God, one of my good friends came over to help and knew a thing or two about thermostat wiring. He quickly popped the thermostat off the wall and directly wired the air conditioning system to the power source. For the next two days, we continually ran the air conditioning system at full blast. The whole time, I chuckled that my nasty ex had finally lost this energetic battle.