Well, here they are a week or so later, about Day 41 or so:
They survived my absence, but only with some help from neighbours. The first day away, my security cameras that I set up to keep an eye on the grow showed that the reservoir that was full when I left was empty. The other camera showed the grow drobe had about two inches of liquid on the floor (good thing it has a liner). One neighbour did a quick morning run to turn off the pumps while I figured out how I might save the grow. After scratching my head for a bit, I called in another neighbour with some tech ability, and between the two of us, we found that one of the timer settings had changed itself from pm to am, so the pump turned on at 7 pm, and was instructed to then turn off at 7:00:05 am. Which meant that it stayed on until the next pump cycle when it got turned off, after pumping the entire reservoir through the plants and onto the drobe floor.
Since the timer was functioning perfectly before I left, and I did not change the hour setting, I conclude that either a power bump scrambled things, or the timer is developing a problem, or evil spirits were screwing with my hardware. At any rate my kind neighbour vacuumed all the nutes out of the drobe, put them back in the reservoir, changed the setting back to pm, and everything worked fine until the dearest (with her new knee) and I returned yesterday, six days later. The plants do not seem to have suffered too much, although the jury will be out for a bit, some of the new growth looks a bit off.
That bloody timer has worked flawlessly for at least three years, and it had to have a problem the one time that I have been forced to leave for a week during my one winter grow. For a while, I figured my annual supply of sleep meds was toast.
Murphy lives in my drobe. But he has been set back a notch of two this time.