Happy Mail

After an inauspicious start to the day, and a very long day at work, I arrived home to find this lovely, lovely thing in my mailbox.

Amy Mitten has done it again!

If I weren't so tired, I'd be tempted to leap in.

But I've been up since 4:38 a.m.

And I was sleeping last night, after a couple of nights when I didn't.

Yesterday the community maintenance man arrived with new triple threat alarms--good for smoke, fire, and carbon monoxide. He installed one upstairs and one downstairs, told Dearly Beloved that they have batteries good for ten years, and left.

I may have mentioned before that Dearly Beloved works nights. And, as usual, if anything weird happens, it happens on those nights when he's at work.

In the middle of the night, something started chirping upstairs.

You may not have heard, but the mountains in the western part of North Carolina are on fire, and the smoke has drifted our direction. My first thought (when I roused enough to identify the sound) was that the alarm was so sensitive it was reacting to that smoke. Not so. It turns out that the batteries that were supposed to be good for ten years actually weren't. So upstairs I had chirping. Downstairs I had a very supercilious voice telling me that the battery was low.

So, before 5 a.m. I was teetering on the step stool trying to punch buttons or open the things to exchange batteries (assuming that I could manage that while mostly asleep). I finally gave up, put a pillow over my head, and tried to sleep for at least another 30 minutes.

It didn't work.

And then I had a major report to write at work--no stress there--and I was getting just a wee bit cranky by the time I headed home.

And dear Amy Mitten had sent me a box of toys, and all the cranky went away.

And now I'm going to bed.

(The maintenance man came by and swapped out the defective alarms for other alarms. Apparently he got a bad batch. I was not the only one roused in the middle of the night. Apparently, though, I was one of the few who didn't call him, starting at midnight. I think he was probably crankier than I was.)