Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Rude Wake Up

Hi All!

Hubby and I have lived in our house for almost ten years now. We are the first owners and actually saw the place built from the ground up. I love this house. It isn't perfect but - it is ours.

Shortly after we moved in we noticed a peculiar quirk of our house. We have a nice smoke alarm system which is hard wired into the house but which also requires batteries (back up I guess??). While we feel very secure that our house won't burst into flame without us noticing, there is that one quirk which sort of annoys us now and again.

Last night - at three in the morning - this little quirk showed up again!

I was blissfully sleeping away - thanks to a muscle relaxer taken to loosen up my tense muscles from the migraine a few days ago - and then it happened. A little electronic "chirp" started entering my dreams. This isn't a cute little sound. It is an annoying -so something about me NOW sound. Needless to say - I was soon wide awake.

At first I thought the sound was our carbon monoxide detector resetting when the electricity goes off - or on. Even though we live in a city it seems like our power is always blipping off and then right back on and that darn monoxide detector is annoying with its chirps when the power is interrupted. Then, I realized that my ceiling fan was still whirring away so it couldn't be power outages.

A couple of chirps later I had it pegged - it is that darn smoke detector. The detector right outside of our bedroom is the ONLY one which chirps like this on a regular (sort of) basis. Hubby dutifully changes out the batteries twice a year when the time changes and you would THINK that would satisfy the detector. Nope.

I should tell you that this isn't the original detector which was at this location. That detector was basically blowing up batteries so we sent it back to the company and got a new detector. We thought all of the excess chirping would stop with the new detector. Wrong! Sure - the batteries are no longer messed up but the darn thing still chirps for new batteries.

Like it chirped last night. At three in the morning!

Knowing that I would never be able to sleep with that darn thing chirping away I lugged out the ladder, hunted down a battery, and changed out the battery. Problem solved.

Then I went back to sleep for the couple of hours I had left before my alarm started chirping. Which is a whole different story!

Trisha

Voice Update: Well - once more I didn't do many exercises yesterday. I pretty much slept to get rid of my post-migraine hangover. I did wake up and continue on my exercise path in the afternoon though. My voice is doing okay. I still miss some of those darned unvoiced consonants but not as many as about a week ago. I did some reading out loud yesterday and it seemed pretty good. I just have to remember to talk quietly!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm telling you this happens all the time here and always and an un-godly hour. The worst if figuring out which one it is...usually it's the kids room and wakes them up...I hate it!

Anonymous said...

I've heard that chirp. It is annoying!

Anonymous said...

We have the same type of system. Unfortunately, if one goes off, they all go off. It's ugly!

Glad you figured it out and I hope you got enough sleep!

Mental P Mama said...

The dreaded chirp. I hate it when it happens. Maybe there's some sort of short in the hard wiring...get the alarm company to come check it out.