Weekend games

Saturday morning, I woke up as usual and headed to the gym, then, post-13k run, took a shower and crashed again. This is my normal weekend when I’m in town and not working. Unlike most mornings, I got jolted out of a semi-conscious state by the annoying beep of a smoke detector.

And thus began a solid half hour of The Beep Game.

You’ve played this. You hear that dang beep but can’t figure out where it’s coming from.  It doesn’t repeat itself quickly, so you can’t just hear it, start walking because you’re sure it’s not in the room you were in at the time, and hear it again. It becomes an audio cat-and-mouse game, and it’ll drive you nuts.

My apartment isn’t all that big, but it’s got three bedrooms with a smoke detector in each. There are two hallways, a long one and a short one. The long one, at the front door, connects the front door to the living room and the short one basically fits a radiator and my L.L. Bean rug. (Plug for L.L. Bean: it is an awesome rug, kind of Navajo-y, but I don’t see it on the website now.) The little hallway serves as the intersection of the three bedrooms. There’s a carbon monoxide detector there and a smoke detector in the long hallway, plus there’s a fifth smoke detector in the living room.

That’s a lot of potential beeps, and it’s not like this is the first time they’ve driven me nuts. However, I can’t ever remember which I’ve changed because it takes more than one or two tries to figure it out.  Saturday was no different. It went off once, signaling that I really should get going, and all I could tell was that it wasn’t loud enough to be the one in my bedroom. This meant that, although annoying, it wasn’t enough to actually drag me out of bed at that time. I had a long week and wanted to sleep late, plus I figured I deserved it after 13k.

Anyway, when I heard it again – with what seemed like a long but indeterminate amount of time in between – I figured I should get up and join The Game.

Eliminating the one in my bedroom still left four smoke detectors, and I really thought it couldn’t be the one in the long hallway or in the desk/closet room, since I really think I’ve changed those before. (The desk/closet room is, obviously, the one with the Drexel desk. I moved the Drexel bookcases in there and, since Turks don’t do closets, I bought a shower curtain rod and rigged it between the wall and the bookcases, providing a home to all my pants and suits.

I moved a chair into the little hallway and waited. It seemed the next beep came faster than it had before, but all I could then determine was that it didn’t sound like a bedroom one at all. I thought it came from the long hall, so I moved the chair and took it out, then went to make pancakes.

Pancakes are the weekend treat. I’m finally whittling down the huge stock of flour that I brought for some inexplicable reason. Today in particular, I used a ton because I made a triple batch of cookies for our guards.

As I was making the pancakes, though, I heard the beep again, so I changed the one in the living room, pulling the old battery out and sticking in the one from the long hallway. This was no easy feat because, as I learned, my living room ceilings are really high and my shoulder is not doing those “lift and twist a little” movements much at all. I tend to compensate by lifting my arm with the other arm, but for this, unlike, say, the little light above me on a flight, required two hands.

A few minutes after I completed the feat, the beep went off again – twice, like 45 seconds between. This made no sense because I swear when I sat in the chair in the little hallway, right outside all three bedroom doors, the beep came in front of me. And now they were coming irregularly! Since I knew I’d changed the one in the desk/closet room at one time, I started in the spare bedroom. Nothing doing, so I tried the one in my bedroom, even though I was absolutely positive the beeps hadn’t come from there.

The beeping continued, and at this point, the game was getting really old, since I’d changed the battery in every single smoke detector I had. By that point, I was tired of The Game but it doesn’t end until the beeping stops, and it hadn’t stopped. I started re-trying them and knew it wasn’t the long hallway one, when, as I was closing the little smoke detector face after changing the battery for the second time, the sound went off from behind me.

At that point, I wondered if random coincidence had drained two batteries at once, so I basically started taking the batteries out of multiple smoke detectors at once – and then, as I was in the hallway, I heard the beep next to me.

Not the smoke detector at all, but the carbon monoxide detector, which is on the wall outside my room. However, there is no way that’s what I heard earlier, since I had been sitting right next to it when I heard the beep in front of me, not to my right, left or behind me.

The good news on that one was that I have rechargeable AA batteries so I could recharge those quickly, but right now, I have two 9-volts out of the five smoke detectors. I think one of them is probably still good, but at this point I don’t care. I’m just so happy to have silence! I had been headed to work that morning but decided to linger, just so I could enjoy the silence.