random thoughts – Day 1,442 – (Tuesday) – noisy blooms

Today was a walk through the valley of what the effs. At 1:30 a.m., one of the detectors woke me up with the annoying chirping sounds. Of course it did. That stuff never happens during daylight awake hours. Not at The BungaLowell, anyway. 

Hello, 1:30 a.m.

There are six units in the house from multiple manufacturers (of course), with two for smoke, three for carbon monoxide, and one for smoke and carbon monoxide. There are two units in the basement, two on the main level, and two upstairs. 

I almost buried my head under an extra pillow, but then I worried that Kiki might be scared by the noise. I hauled myself out of bed, and started checking units. A carbon monoxide detector in the basement was replaced in December and ruled out. It was finally determined to be the living room Kidde smoke and carbon monoxide detector and the step stool was pulled from its space near the fridge to open it up and replace the three batteries in the chamber.

It turned out it didn’t need batteries. The label inside the unit declared it to have reached the end of its ten years of useful life in January and it was emitting the death chirps. If it wasn't already dead, I might have stomped the heck out of it or smashed it to bits with a hammer. 

The rude awakening, detector search, battery search, and step stool dragging had me extra alert and wide awake. I ended up looking online at smoke and carbon monoxide detectors at 2:00 a.m. Of course, since the unit was installed, it has changed product numbers a couple times. The KN-COSM-B was replaced with the KN-COSM-BA which then became the 900-CUDR. In case you are wondering. This is knowledge I could have lived the rest of my life not knowing. 

Hopefully, the unit delivering tomorrow will fit into the existing harness on the ceiling, or there will be some colorful language happening as I swear my way through trying install a different one. OR screaming at a rep from Kidde customer service about the product info and FAQs on their website.

The garden of WTFs continued to bloom throughout the day. I saw that Kiki had clawed the edge of the  living room chair. It took 11 frustrating minutes to log into the work computer. It’s a steady 68 degrees in the house, and for at least the past four days I have been extra cold, despite being swaddled in fleece and wearing a hat. I finally got curious enough to take my temperature and it was a surprising new low of  96.4 degrees – practically that of a corpse. 

Kiki and her royal seat.

During the afternoon, a neighbor and a couple other people were in the shared driveway right outside my office window. They dragged a kayak from the yard onto the asphalt. They blasted some crappy country music and then yelled to each other over it. In turn, I blasted middle eastern belly dance music on my computer as loud as I could make it, in an effort to drown the country out of my office. It was the same tracks in YouTube Music that I use at the office-office when it gets noisy.

After work, the search for pet insurance resumed. It turns out there are abut 726 companies offering pet insurance with about 726 variations in coverage, and since the search began a few days ago, they have all been bombarding my inbox and social media feed. And the ads for “coverage as low as $9 a months?” Ha! Good luck with that treasure hunt.

At least my supper didn’t land on the floor like Monday night. Kiki was a little angel lounging and napping on the living room chair all afternoon. She let me pet her again, but when I retired to the living room for some Netflix and laptop time, she left the chair and sat on the floor behind the chair and peeked at me for two hours. It was the sweetest two hours of the day, and I was so busy cooing, “Kiki is such a good girl” from across the room that I didn’t mutter “what in the actual f*ck” even once, in a refreshing change from the afternoon.