Last night I went to bed around 9:00 to read for a while. Soon Sundance came in to investigate. Since Tom is away, she decided to come pester me. She loves to rub up against the book I'm trying to read or to move in close to my face and lie down across my arm. I don't see how it can possibly be comfortable, but that's her schtick.I tried to keep reading, but finally gave up and turned out the light around 9:30 and dozed with Sundance lying up against me purring...
About 10:15, I was awakened by the urgent beep of a smoke detector crying for its battery. The one outside Tom's bedroom is near the kitchen and often gives trouble. So I got up, dragged a chair down there, pulled the battery out and it stopped. The alarms are actually hooked up to the house electrical system, so the battery is only a backup. Tom discovered that we can take the battery out if necessary to shut off the annoying beep signaling a low battery.
No noise, so I went back to bed and tried to get back to sleep. At this point Sundance had left the building.
Just as I began to doze again, another beep dragged me out of bed. I came out and looked around. Now I am almost deaf in my right ear, which makes it hard for me to detect the direction from which a sound is coming. The open plan of the house, the pitched ceilings and the hard floors make it a wonderful echo chamber anyway.
But I saw that there is an alarm over the door to my room. Unfortunately it is up near the top of that pitched ceiling. I put on shoes and went to drag in the big stepladder from the garage. Not a happy camper, needless to say.
I got it all set up and then heard another beep, and it didn't sound like it came from above me. I got down and looked around. There was another alarm outside the door into Tom's office. This one was lower and I was able to reach it from a chair. I took out the battery, waited for a while and then went back to bed.
Time passes...
Beep! It is now almost 11:00 and I still have not resolved the problem.
I go back to the alarm I had just de-batteried and decided to look for a replacement battery,. Maybe that would make it happy. I looked in the box where Tom keeps the extra batteries and found one. I plugged it into place and waited. No noise, all seems well.
As I headed back to my bed, another beep.
This time when I looked up at the alarm outside the office, I noticed an ominous shadow. Sure enough, there was an alarm on the ceiling just inside Tom's office as well. (Why are there two alarms within two square feet? I haven't a clue.) I couldn't tell where the beep came from, so I disabled both alarms. This time I turned on the TV and lay down on the couch to watch Drake and Josh and waited. And waited. And waited.
About midnight I decided I had fixed the problem and went back to bed. By now my body was past its normal falling-asleep time, my adrenaline was flowing from having been dragged out of sleep several times in the last two hours and having climbed up and down ladders and chairs.
I was just falling asleep again around 1:30 when Cassidy decided to jump up on the bed and poke at my feet. There's another heart-starter-upper. I was just hoping she hadn't brought a snake with her as an offering.
I guess I got to sleep about 2:00 or 2:30...
2 comments:
There is a Friends episode where Phoebe stays up the whole night with this entire 30 minute adventure of her and her alarm that wouldn't stop.
I thought of that Friends episode when I was going through this, hoping the fire department wasn't going to show up to find out why I shut the alarms down. Tom's cousin Jerry lives down the road and is a member of the department, so he might have been the one to come knocking.
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