Chirp, Chirp!

This isn’t about birds but . . Louise is setting on the nest again.  We really don’t need any more baby chickens but when I tried to talk to Louise about that . . well, in typical chicken fashion, she just looked at me like she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.  I do believe we’re going to have a bumper crop of Silkies this year.

But the chirp, chirp I’m talking about is the smoke alarm!  I mentioned this on Facebook at about 5 this morning and my friends have agreed that those things never go off during the day.

We always change our smoke alarm batteries when we set the clocks back in October/November so that battery has not been in there long.  We had the same thing happen in Missouri with a battery.  The house there was built by a family with a handicapped son and there were either 9 or 11 smoke alarms in that house.  They were hard wired with a battery backup and with that many smoke alarms, when we set our clock back, we only changed the batteries in the bedroom smoke alarms and we waited for the others to chirp.  One year we had changed the bedroom batteries and in just a few months, we began hearing a chirp.  Some of the smoke alarms were so close together that it was hard to know which one was actually making the noise.  We changed two batteries before realizing it was one of the batteries that had just been replaced.

Last night, I talked to my friend, Sarah, on the phone til about 1 a.m.  Then for some crazy reason, I read for a while.  So I hadn’t been asleep long when the chirping woke me up at 4 a.m.  Vince seemed to be sleeping through it so I said . . fine . . I can go back to sleep.  It won’t bother me.  I knew I couldn’t reach the smoke alarm even standing in a chair and I was not going to try to drag the ladder in the house in the middle of the night.  No need to wake Vince up if he was sleeping like a rock.  I fell back to sleep til Vince came in with the ladder and made all kinds of noise.  I guess he figured if he couldn’t sleep, there was no reason I should be sleeping.  He had to go to the shop (slam the door!) and get the ladder, come back in the house (slam the door), bang the ladder around, say a few bad words . . whether to the ladder or the smoke alarm I am not sure but I pretended not to hear.

The smoke alarm is down.  I asked him where he put it and he said he took the battery out and the smoke alarm was on the  coffee table.  He would put a new battery in tonight.

The funny thing is that Vince thought I slept through the whole thing because I didn’t make a sound while he was doing all this.  But the even funnier thing is . . a while back, a Facebook friend had their smoke alarm start beeping during the night.  The husband got up and put it in the fridge or freezer so he wouldn’t have to hear it.  That wasn’t so funny but when she posted about it on FB, he came back with some hilarious response and I have laughed and made fun of him for months about that incident.

When I posted about the alarm chirping in the middle of the night, the husband was on the wife’s FB and left me this comment:

Yes, Paul . . karma! 🙂

In all seriousness, there have been two houses lost in our little town in the past few days.  Thankfully all the folks got out without injury but if you don’t have smoke alarms or if you haven’t changed the batteries recently, please check them and make sure they’re working.  And carbon monoxide detectors need to be changed out after 5 or 7 years.  If you have an old one and need a CO detector, please be sure you have adequate protection.  When we bought this house, an elderly couple had lived here and the man had passed away and the lady still lived here.  With gas heat, stove and water heater, along with a fireplace, there were no CO detectors and both smoke alarms had no batteries.  With something like this, it’s so easy to take precautions to protect yourself and your family and I’m always amazed to find anyone who doesn’t keep smoke alarms and CO detectors, if needed, working.