posted 2006/07/28 at 18:02
It is amazing how easily I can be tempted to fall into old, dangerous patterns of behaviour here.
Quick setup here: Last night was my mother's birthday celebration, and owing to the occasion and all, I decided to go off my diet to have some birthday cake and ice cream. I had some soda with that, because of course you have to have more sugar to wash down all that sugar with. This, of course, led to more cake and ice cream, and more soda, and ... sigh, I'm just a big sugar addict, okay?
The point of all this is that I got so wired up that instead of going to bed between one and two in the morning like I had been recently, I went to bed around six. I don't think I actually got to sleep there until seven or so. The worst part is that I didn't spend all those extra hours last night being productive in any way, as I just wound up bouncing around the Internet here looking up marginally useful information all over the place.
So, of course, at around 0930 or so the smoke detectors start blaring like crazy and wake me up quite rudely. We all stumbled around looking for the fire, and of course there wasn't one. We figured that the detectors were being set off because of the oppressive humidity, so we closed the house up and sure enough the detectors didn't go off again. (Last year we had a similar problem with the smoke detectors going off because the space between the roof and the ceiling of the office was getting incredibly hot.) I fell back into bed after that and stayed there until around 1300 or so, but I never really fell back asleep so now I'm really feeling out of it.
The worst part of all of this is that, given how much trouble the smoke detectors have given us here, I am sorely tempted to ask that we simply power them down over the summer. This in spite of the fact that I know how terrifying it is to see your house burn before you, this in spite of the fact that I watched my sister lose pretty much everything but the clothes on her back five years ago, this in spite of the fact that I lost a fair amount of stuff in the fire, this in spite of the fact that I would do pretty much anything to avoid having to spend another ten-plus months sharing a hotel room with my family. I know how incredibly stupid it is for me to want the smoke detectors to be shut off, but at the same time I'm so sick and tired of these false alarms that I'd probably scream about it if I weren't so damn tired right now.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon