How alarming! Yesterday was one of those days which I could have lived without. Actually, it wasn't all bad. I just could have lived without our smoke alarms. The day would have been perfect if those stupid fire alarms wouldn't have gone off...repeatedly. There was no fire. There was no smoke. The windows were open but the only smell coming in from outside was the smell of new mowed grass. The alarms went off and then stopped. OK. Which fire alarm system went off? Was it our system that calls the fire department automatically? Was it the system that comes built into our house? My husband and I went frantically searching the file cabinets for the information that we keep on both systems. Blessedly the fire alarms had ceased after only a few short moments. No fire engines showed up at our doorstep. No calls came in from our monitoring station (I think it's somewhere in Kansas). Still no smoke smelled, no evidence of fire. All of a sudden the alarms went off again. They were loud. Which alarm was it? We scurried about from one smoke detector to the other, peering anxiously up at them to see if we could see....anything. Nothing. The alarming noise ceased. We determined that the culprit smoke detectors were those that came built into our house after I tested the monitoring system. The alarm given off by the monitor system is loud enough to make your ears bleed. The alarm that we had heard three times now wasn't all that loud. It was loud but it wasn't ear bleed loud. My husband decided to check the batteries in the smoke detectors. From past experience the sound these particular smoke detectors make when they need new backup batteries hasn't ever been alarming...it's more of an irritating, single pulse screech and it's usually only noticeable in the middle of the night when you're trying to get some sleep and they won't stop and they won't let you sleep until you get up, drag out the ladder and replace the stupid batteries. This was nothing like we were experiencing for the fourth time as my husband grabbed the ladder from the garage. None of these detectors are reachable by anything by a 10-foot ladder. Awww!!! There they went off again. We ran around looking for a blinking red LED light on one of the detector units but again failed to reach the culprit in time to see it. We started uninstalling units, one by one. Our house has 9 smoke detectors not counting the one unit that came with our monitoring service. Apparently there are building codes which require smoke detectors in every room and hallway. After the alarms went off yet again (backup batteries), my husband decided to dissect the suckers and see if he could see anything. Could there be a spider infestation? I could just imagine some little tiny spider doing the hoochie-coochie over the sensor of one of my nine smoke detectors, laughing it's little butt off. Do spiders have butts? As my husband dissected smoke detectors looking for who knows what or who knows who, we enjoyed blessed silence. I was given two of the smoke detectors to babysit while I sat at my computer. We were still watching in vain for the red LED sensor that would denoter THE detector that was the cause of our shattered nerves and my poor headache. Silence reigned. No more alarms....until 10PM last night. Darn it! More silence. My husband finally dissected the last smoke detector this afternoon. This last detector was filthy. We're praying that dust was causing it to imagine that there was smoke in the house. I pray for this because my husband cleaned said unit and has finally reinstalled all the smoke detectors back into their proper places in the house. I pray for this because I don't want to hear another smoke detector as long as I live. I pray for this because I still have my headache. If they go off again I'm going to make him go out and buy all new smoke detectors to replace these stupid things...ones that will glow red if they're triggered and wave a red flag of surrender after misfiring so we can kill them.

Today's Little Bit of Trivia

Where there's smoke there's lunt. That's what the fume from a pipe is called. There was no lunt in my house yesterday.