The other night I woke up and looked at the clock. It said 2:00 AM.

Which meant I had two and a half hours to go before getting up at my usual time.

But for some reason I couldn’t fall back to sleep, I just kept tossing and turning.

I keep the bedroom door closed and after a while I noticed under the crack in the door that there were lights on in the rest of the house.

WTF?

I use Apple’s HomeKit for most of the lighting and other systems in my house, and I have certain lights set to turn on automatically around 4:30 AM when I normally get up, so I can walk into a lighted den or living room. What were the lights doing on at this hour?

I mulled over the question in my mind for an interval and finally, still not getting back to sleep, I got up to check. Sure enough, the lights that normally should have been turned on at 4:30 were now on. I made a mental note to call Apple tech support about this and told Siri to turn them all off.

Then I noticed some even odder.

I use a white noise machine in my bedroom to help me sleep, and it had just turned itself off. Very strange as it was scheduled to turn itself off at 5:30, why was it turning itself off now? What was wrong with Apple’s HomeKit?

So I told Siri to turn the Sleep Machine (that’s what I call the white noise machine) back on, and I crawled back into bed, hoping that perhaps now I might be able to fall back to sleep for whatever time I had left before 4:30.

But I still kept tossing.

Finally, I looked at my watch.

Which I should have done before.

My watch told me it was nearly 6:00 AM.

I had not woken up in the middle of the night, I had woken up around my usual time. It was my bedroom clock that was bonkers!

Here I had just wasted an hour and a half of fruitless fretting when I should have been up and around being productive.

And I made a mental note to change the batteries in the bedroom clock.

Actually, I ordered a new one.

And there was nothing wrong with Apple’s HomeKit. It had turned everything on and off at the schedule times.