Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Things That Go BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP In the Night

Around 2:30 in the morning, a smoke alarm went off in the laundry room of the apartment. My room is next to the laundry room so I should have been the first one to wake up. Instead, I incorporated the beeping into my dream. Until Scott's voice was heard, then I woke up. I woke up still groggy and had trouble finding the location of the smoke alarm. It was also constantly beeping at such a pitch that had I found the alarm first, I might have smashed it out of frustration that my ear were being assulated. Scott found it and got to stop beeping.

We couldn't figure out if it was a smoke alarm or a carbon monoxide dector. Tara was awake at this point too. There was a weird haze in the laundry room and we started to scare ourselves at the prospect of a carbon monoxide leak. We opened all the windows and called the fire department. Is the leak from our apartment or perhaps from the dry cleaners downstairs? Is there an actual leak or is it just a low battery alarm spasm?

I checked the heater in my room and found that the gas line to the heater was still on "open" and hissing but I hadn't been using the heater at all since last winter. So I turned the valve off and heart the hiss of gas stop. Was this the source of the problem? If it was, why hadn't this problem occured earlier in the year?

The fire department sent a truck over and fire fighters came into our place with their own dectors. Nothing registered. But by this point the haze was gone. One of they guys had a faux hawk and Tara dubbed him Faux Hawk Jones. Since there was no problem they could find, they told us it was probably a low battery problem and then left.

We were still a little freaked so we left the windows open and went back to bed. I'm still blogging so obviously I'm still alive.

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