Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Every day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-first day of the month is "Safety."
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Monday night right before yoga started, we noticed three tween/teen boys climbing up the fire escape of the community center holding energy drinks. Everyone looked at me and I found myself meandering outside to ask them to climb down. "Hey, guys, you're not really supposed to be up there. Can you come down?" They were so nice and polite and apologetic as they clambered down. "Nice view up there, huh?"
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Monday night was a rough night in our house. Dr. BB had a weird tickle in his throat and he just couldn't cough it out. He was up and down to get water several times. Meanwhile, my right flank is sore (is it muscle pain? is it a kidney stone? who knows?) and my heating pad, which is really a bear, kept shifting and I'd wake up to shift it back. This bear was a present from my mom when I left for Minneapolis more than twenty years ago, yo. It holds heat better than any non-electric heating pad I've ever had and all it takes is two minutes in the microwave. It has started to fall apart, as in the fabric is actually wearing at the seams, and I've sewed it together. My mom has no idea how to replace it.
So I was awake about forty-five minutes before the alarm went off, slogging my way through yet another endless book on my Kindle (my ebooks have been rough recently), but Dr. BB was finally asleep, so I was ignoring my bladder and trying to give him that extra sleep.
We have an old house. There aren't any fire/carbon monoxide detectors wired into our house, so one of the first things we did when we moved in was to install one on every level of the house. The one upstairs beeped super loudly at 5:56am this morning and had a fun little voice come on to tell us that the battery was low.
I was up out of bed as if it was an actual fire, while Dr. BB stumbled around trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. We figured it out quickly that it was the monitor at the top of the stairs.
By the time we were able to get the battery compartment over, get the batteries (it was a new package from Costco and required tools to get into), and change the batteries, there was no snuggling back into bed for morning snuggles. Zelda was downstairs screaming for food, I was wide awake, and Dr. BB was charmingly disheveled by his morning awakening.
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So then Tuesday morning I went to that yoga/dance/meditation class. One of the first things the instructor said was to take notice of how safe we are in the space, how safe we are in community at this moment.
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Sometimes it's a stretch for me to come up with something in my life that's related to the prompt of the day. But sometimes it feels like the universe is trying to tell me something.
So much Safety, and all of it giving you issues!
ReplyDeleteThe low-battery signals are the big drawback of the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. We try to be vigilant and change ours every time we change the clocks, but sometimes we don't have batteries, and a couple of our alarms are in places that require a small stepladder. We say, "We'll get that one tomorrow" and we forget. Sigh.
Yes, we're reluctant to change batteries every time we change the clocks because it seems wasteful since it's unlikely the batteries NEED to be changed then, but because we've made this decision, we're occasional woken up by beeps.
DeleteI admire you for writing to a prompt every day. Safety would trip me up as a topic-- as much as it does when it comes time to change batteries in those alarms. Ugh.
ReplyDeleteSafety has been surprisingly hard for me. I just don't think about it much, which is probably a good indicator that my life is going pretty well. But I also think if I focus on a prompt for a few days before I have to write about it, something usually comes up.
DeleteI'm glad you have smoke and CO detectors. We have them and we actually had a CO leak when I was 32 weeks pregnant AND had a one-year-old. It was very scary and I had to go to the hospital to make sure my baby was okay. So many people don't, or don't replace the batteries, and it is really a serious situation!
ReplyDeleteOh, that sounds very scary and I'm glad you all made it out safely! Putting in the detectors was important to both of us, but I hope they never have to be used!
DeleteWhat's inside of the bear that holds the heat? I have a rice pack that I like to use on cold nights to keep my feet warm.
ReplyDeleteGetting woken up by a low battery alert is annoying. The second worse thing is when you get the low battery beep and can't figure out which alarm it's coming from...grrrr.
The bear holds little plastic beads. I don't know what type of plastic, but when the fabric wears, little white beads pop out. I have other packs with rice and cherry pits and they don't hold heat as well, so I really want this bear to be in my life for another twenty years.
DeleteWe don't have a CO detector- should we? I guess we should! I"ll bring this up with my husband.
ReplyDeleteI hope you guys got a better night's sleep on Tuesday.
Ours is a combo smoke/CO detector. I think everyone probably *should* have one (see Nicole's scary story above), but I don't know how common they are. They're about $35-40 on Amazon, so not crazy expensive, but definitely worth it!
DeleteI had safety as a journal prompt today! Whoa. What IS the Universe telling us...
ReplyDeleteWow! There's definitely something at play here!
DeleteGlad your interaction with the teens went well! Sometimes they can be a little mouthy. Teens, in general, not these specific ones whom I do not know.
ReplyDeleteThe battery alert sounds very intense!!! Although maybe better than the ones in our house, which do the intermittent cheeping thing where you have to walk around and stand under every single one for an undetermined length of time in order to figure out which one is beeping at you.
There was one in our basement we could not figure out for DAYS once. It would only beep every 20-30 minutes, so we were never IN the basement to see which one it was. I think my husband just ended up changing the battery in every possible device it could have been and it stopped. *sigh* I wish they would actually beep constantly - you'd have to fix it right away!
DeletePaul has something similar that is shaped life an elephant, but is bigger and it has the most lovely smell - probably lilac or something? We've never heated it up for him, though. He sleeps w/ that and another elephant that was meant to be a teething toy for Will but he claimed it as his own but he calls it by the Spanish word for elephant. So the other night we couldn't find it at bedtime so I was yelling down to Phil, "have you seen elephante?" This is an example of a conversation I never foresaw having before I had kids!
ReplyDeleteWhy do those batteries die at THE WORST times? We have had batteries die in the middle of the night in our smoke alarm and OMG the beeping sound is SO LOUD.
I don't mind that the beeping is loud because I'd want it to be loud in an emergency and it's reassuring to me, but you're right that it's always at the most inconvenient times! Why never at 7pm? It's always the middle of the night!
DeleteThere is humour in this post, such as tools required to open the battery package. But you were not laughing at the time for some strange reason. Here’s to your health.
ReplyDeleteWe weren't laughing because we were confused. LOL. Now we're laughing.
DeleteWhy do these damn fire detector batteries ALWAYS give out at night? ALWAYS!
ReplyDeleteALWAYS! Never when you're fully awake and functional.
DeleteMy comment was going to be the same as San's - they ALWAYS go off at night. Why???
ReplyDeleteI'm now wondering if my apartment-complex-provided detectors are just for smoke, or if they are also for carbon monoxide. Huh. I'll have to ask! they are hard-wired in but the maintenance people do change the batteries along with our air filters in spring and fall. Not my decision, but I probably would do the same if I owned my home, simply out of anxiety. :)
It's smart to have batteries even in the hard-wired ones in case the power goes out! We probably should change the batteries more regularly, but if they beep to let us know batteries need to be changed, I'm good with that.
DeleteI have had my share of those batterie alarms from smoke detetors. Once in bed right above us. I was too short to reach it and the husband wouldn't wake up. He would die for sure...
ReplyDeleteHE SLEPT THROUGH THE BEEPING?! How did he DO that?
DeleteIt reminds me of the time my family was staying at a hotel for a wedding and the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. My father's cousin was absolutely blotto and just slept through the whole thing. It's a legendary family story. Crazy. I am not a light sleeper, but I'm also not someone who would sleep through a tornado!
I know, crazy, huh? We had the hotel alarm to when we checked in to a newly opened one in Vienna and suddenly in the middle of the night i found myself in the lobby in pyjamas. Husband was awake when it went off. And it was a false alarm. Ever since i am trying to wear the "good pyjamas" more often because you never know who sees it.
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