Last Friday, I got a call from the alarm company that our alarm was going off and the police had been dispatched. Awesome, I thought. We’d been having problems with our alarm for a few weeks. One Sunday night in September, we even had a high-pitched noise coming out of it, but were able to turn it off without any more problems. I put calling the alarm company on my to-do list, but never really got around to it. So on Friday, I raced home the 40 miles to check and make sure everything was okay. And thankfully it was.
Fast forward to last night, as I took Maddie on her final walk of the night. Suddenly, I heard an alarm going off. At 11:30pm. In my extremely quiet neighborhood. I knew it was mine. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else’s. Just not possible. So I ran back to the house, dragging Maddie, because she’s not really “into” running and I didn’t think to stop and pick her up. I ran in the front door, screaming at Erajh as to why he had not bothered to turn off the alarm. I proceeded to the key pad and punched in our code, only to find that the sound would not stop.
At that point, I looked over to see Erajh was standing under the fire alarm with a long stick. “It’s the fire alarm, Genius”, he responded. Hmm…so it was. The alarm code wasn’t going to work here.
He proceeded to poke at the fire alarm with a stick, much the way people poke at sleeping animals in cartoons, while I encouraged him to hit the fire alarm like a pinata. I mean, we have more, right? Thankfully, I stopped encouraging it before he took me up on my suggestion. I then got a ladder from the garage and we dismantled the fire alarm, to find the original battery inside. We checked to make sure all the other fire alarms were working, and headed off to bed.
Around 45 minutes later, and out of absolutely no where, my husband says, “Maybe there is a fire in the house. Did you check Greenleigh’s room? It’s strange that she didn’t wake up with that alarm going off.” Um, what? That’s impossible. It was 45 minutes ago. But still, it was odd that she hadn’t gotten up.
So we went from room to room sniffing for smoke and differing on whether we could in fact smell smoke (Erajh is firmly convinced that Greenleigh is smoking cigarettes in her room). About 5 minutes later Erajh turns to me and says, “Oh, I guess there’s no fire. We’re probably fine”. And within 30 seconds of falling back in bed, he was dead asleep and snoring. I, on the other hand, slept with my eyes open. Sniffing for smoke. Sure that there was a slow burning fire in the house that no other fire alarm could pick up.
“Figuring out what is wrong with the fire alarm” is now on the list. Hopefully, I’ll get to it sooner than I addressed the alarm issue.
