Picture this: it’s three in the morning. You’ve been having a blissful dream, and the feeling lingers even though the dream itself does not. You turn over, smiling in your sleep, and relaxing more, because the a/c has kicked in and the drop in temperature is soothing. You’re halfway back to REM sleep when you’re jolted by the high-pitched *BEEP* of what you think is the smoke alarm. You try to ignore it – maybe it will go away, bumblebee fashion. It does not.

So of course you do what any sane woman who is wrapped in sleep and blankets would do, you roll over and nudge your husband. “Fuzzy,” you hiss. “It’s doing it again.”

“Oh,” he murmurs, clearly not awake, or cognizant of what you’re telling him.

You drift for a while, until- *BEEP* – it happens again. And the dog reacts, becoming agitated, and distressed. This time when you nudge your husband, it’s much more pointed. “Fuzzy, the beeping is happening. MAKE IT STOP.”

He grumbles, but leaves bed. You leave bed as well, small dog in tow, and spend some time in the bathroom. The beeping continues. It’s not a real alarm, more like a low-battery alert.

Your husband, meanwhile, is mucking about the house, playing with things. In the past, raising the temperature of the house has made the beeping stop. Or seemed to. But this night it does not, so now you’re HOT as well as frustrated by the persistant *beep* issuing forth every 30 seconds.

Your husband, calmly, goes to the one smoke detector he can easily reach, and attempts to duplicate the problem. First there is a loud klaxon, then, instead of just one beep, you have two. Offset. One about five seconds after the other. For the next ten minutes, you and your agitated dog are subjected to *BEEP* *beep* instead of merely *BEEP*. Fortunately, reseating the smoke alarm that was mucked with stops the second sound.

You go to your computer, to see if it really is the a/c causing the issue. Just in case. You manage to track down information on the thermostat, and reset it to temperatures you like, since, apparently, the two systems are not related, and any seeming relationship was just coincidental. At least, now, it’s getting cooler again. That helps.

When you leave your computer room, and padd back to the bedroom, you find your husband, naked except for athletic socks, standing on the stepstool. Well, no, actually, he’s standing on a case of (warm) orange soda that he’s put on the top step of the stepstool so that he can reach the smoke detector in the bedroom. He manages to remove it, and unplug the power cord tucked inside. For a moment you are both hopeful that this has solved the problem.

*BEEP*
Apparently not.

You are asked if it came from the smoke detector which you are now holding. You answer that it did seem closer, but that you’re not certain. You remove the backup battery, and wait. *BEEP*. Well, it’s not the smoke detector, after all.

You leave the room, and try to find more information. Or at least food, since now you’re hungry. While you nibble leftover baked rigatoni, your husband makes a bunch of clunk-clunk noises in the bedroom, and in the duct above the laundry center – he’s still wearing only athletic socks, and you have to stay out of the room to avoid giggling. He bangs his sore toe climbing down, and you have to comfort him.

Several minutes later, you realize the beeping has stopped. Your husband informs you that since it’s now seven, he may as well shower. When he’s done, he says, he’s going back to sleep for another hour or so. You decide going back to bed seems like a good option.

You drift while he showers. When he rejoins you in bed, you ask, “How’d you make it stop?”

“There’s a speaker on the wall – the plate we thought was the doorbell, except we don’t have a doorbell – I banged on it and shined the flashlight at it. And stuff.”

Several hours later, you find out from maintenance that the plate is a speaker attached to the smoke detection system, and that it was broadcasting a low battery signal from elsewhere. They promise to come by “before the end of the day” and fix it. They don’t show up, but the *beep* seems to be muted, despite the fact that you now have it so cold in the apartment that even you are claiming your feet are cold.

Typically, maintenance never shows up.
And you fear going to bed …fear things going *beep* in the night.

I have this habit of undertaking upgrades when I should be getting ready for bed. Tonight, for example, I upgraded to Movable Type version 3.11.

I don’t really care so much about the new dynamic pages – it’s nice, but I’m not so in love with PHP that I need it. But I LOVE the new subcategory feature.

Tomorrow, I’ll upgrade the Book Blog as well.

I say… And you think…?

1. Courage:: under fire
2. Stamina:: endurance
3. Leader:: role model
4. Idea:: spark
5. Rockstar:: Smash Mouth
6. Dew:: morning
7. Guards:: crossing
8. Lenny:: Bruce
9. Alliance:: interstellar
10. Cigarettes:: cloves

I was awakened by a bright light in my eyes at about five this morning. As I was in the middle of a film noir-type dream at the time, my semi-conscious brain turned a too-long, too-bright flash of lightning into the interrogation lamp at a grungy police station. Or at least, my imagined version of one.

Fuzzy and Cleo were blissfully snoring, unaffected by the flashes and bangs of the storm, but Zorro was agitated, and kept moving from my pillow to near my feet and back again. Chihuahua claws are not at all pleasant on bare shoulders, by the way. Also, since I’d been itchy and pleghmy at bedtime, I’d already awakened once before, at two-thirty, to take an antihistamine.

I spent all day on the net reworking a loan with my mother, but it won’t be ready to submit til tomorrow. Which is good really, because I’ve been drowsy all day – the antihistamine hit me harder than they usually do, I think because I haven’t been drinking coffee every day (try not to faint) or taking them very often. I wanted to nap, but then we had the loan to fix, and by the time we were done it was nearly five and I hadn’t eaten, but I finally went into the bedroom at about six, opened all the windows to let the cool (if damp) air in, and slept for a couple of hours. I’m fighting sleep as I write this, really, but Fuzzy’s working online, and the dogs get agitated if we’re in separate rooms, and anyway, it’s nice being near him when we haven’t seen each other all day.

One more complaint: I’m hot. I don’t think it’s actually horribly hot in here, but I’m hot, and I really want to take a sledgehammer to the thermostat in here. There’s some weird temperature balance prgrammed into it, that causes one of the sensors or fire alarms to emit high-pitched beeps every thirty seconds until the temperatures equalize. For the first three weeks we were here, we could set the temp to 71, but if it was set cooler, we got the stupid beeping. This week, apparently because it’s cooler outside, we’re stuck in the 74-78 range, which seems comfortable, I suppose, but since all the windows in the apartment are on the same wall, here’s no cross-ventilation, so outside temps don’t cool the inside, especially if it’s sunny. Personally, I could learn to ignore the beeping, but they hurt Zorro’s ears – he apparently senses the sound just before we do – and he’s been hiding under the bed, and then I feel like a horrible dog-parent. Also, even though he hasn’t had a seizure in two and a half years, I’m terrified the sound might trigger one.

But there was some nice stuff today, even in my crabbytired fog. Like, the storm was amazing – if it hadn’t required putting on real clothes and climbing down three flights of stairs, I’d have been out dancing in the rain – and then in the mail there was a $600 refund from our old Mortgage company, which I hadn’t been expecting, and then I got the approval to be a co-ML for the DFW NaNoWriMo crew – so, all in all, a good day.

Tomorrow I will make the effort to go out into the rain, if there’s more, just because I know it’ll make me smile. And I’ll make a point of drinking coffee, despite the flat-basket coffee maker (it’s temporary, rented, not MINE, so no, not replacing it), because even if it won’t give me clarity, it’ll make Fuzzy stop sending me links about caffeine addiction.

House Countdown: 10 days

Just as you can tell the beginning of the Christmas season when Starbucks brings out the red cups, you can tell that autumn has hit when places the the Barnes and Noble Cafe start serving pumpkin cheesecake. This weekend, we toasted the beginning of fall by spending an hour at the local B&N on the way back from dinner, where I purchased a collection of Halloween cards (coming soon to some of YOUR mailboxes), and a birthday card for a friend in England. (Her birthday’s actually TODAY, October 3rd, but for some reason I thought it was the nineteenth. I blame the move. I figure this is a good excuse for anything I mess up between now and Thanksgiving.)

I also bought the latest Anita Blake novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams, which I’d managed to forget was coming out at all. Yay for surprises! Yay for Fuzzy spotting it, after I’d gone from the restroom directly to the card section with the intention of buying cards and a magazine.

But that was actually the END of the weekend.

The beginning, Rana’s opening, I already mentioned. Afterwards, we went out for dinner at Charleston’s, where the ambiance (dim flickering lights, cozy intimate booths, great prime rib) was perfect for a stormy autumn evening.

Saturday, I woke early, wired from meeting new people, and from a series of extremly disturbing dreams, involving Asian vampires, office stairwells, and bad disco music. And I mean really early. Like, 5 AM early. So I puttered on the web, IM’d with a friend who lives in a different part of TX, and then went back to bed for a couple of hours. When we were both awake and functioning, we headed out in search of breakfast, despite the fact that it was nearly 4 in the afternoon at that point.

Even though we knew they were a kitschy chain, we wound up at Cracker Barrel because we like new things, and we ALSO knew they served breakfast all day, which we had. Their sausage was a little salty for me, but the coffee was fresh, and decently strong (for restaurant coffee), and the staff was really friendly, and we had fun with the peg board game (there’s one at every table). After we ate, while Fuzzy was in the restroom, I wandered around the country store portion of the establishment, picking up a wrought iron tree that holds ten jack’o’lantern-shaped votive holders for $20. (I resisted the urge to buy the pumpkin tea set. I wish I hadn’t.)

We then wandered in and out of The RoomStore and Rooms to Go‘s outlet store, not so much buying, as pricing certain things we need to get (a new entertainment center, guest room furniture, a china hutch) for the house at some point.
Continue reading →

So for the first time since we’ve been here, we headed out of the house after Fuzzy got home, not to see a Realtor (wonderful as ours is), or go to Kinkos or anything else businessy, and not to see a movie or wander around a bookstore, or anything else largely insular, but to see a friend’s art exhibit.

The friend in question, is Rana, who writes Notes from an Eclectic Mind, a witty and entertaining blog I’ve been frequenting for about a year now, and the exhibit was at her local Starbucks. Her digital photos are as wonderful as Clay’s, but in a totally different way, and it was wonderful both to meet her (and select members of her circle of friends) and to see her work hung on the wall, instead of the web. She’s as warm and witty in person as she comes across in text, and I wish we’d been able to chat longer, but it’s a decent drive from Lewisville to Fort Worth, especially in Friday night traffic, and a storm.

Oh, right, the storm.

As we left the apartment, we both looked at the weird color of the sky – rain-pregnant gray-green over sunset-orange – and decided it looked ominous. But there was no actual rain, until the last five miles of the trip, although there was much lightning.

Just outside Fort Worth, though, the rain came. At first it was normal rain, heavy, but not scary, and the lightning was bright, but festive (well, if you’re me, and attuned to stormy weather). Almost immediately, however, it was as if someone opened all the fire hydrants in the universe, and the water was landing on us. We missed an exit from one freeway to another, because the rain was coming down in such thick sheets that we couldn’t see the signs – we could barely see the ROAD. But Fuzzy’s an excellent foul-weather driver, and I was more annoyed at being late, than scared.

I was momentarily startled, when a lightning flash revealed a giant skull on a building, but then we moved around a curve, and the Haunted House sign on what is (apparently) a club, was visible. Once I realized what it was, I thought it was cool, and nicely spooky, it being October now, and the Dracula ligtning being better than special effects.

We finally made it to Starbucks after circumventing an ACTUAL blown hydrant that was gushing into an already-flooded intersection, and met everyone, and had coffee. We were graciously welcomed, and made to feel very comfortable, and of course the art was beautiful. (Also of course: the rain tapered off as soon as we arrived.)

After visiting a while, we crossed the parking lot for a nice quiet dinner, enjoying the dim lighting and flickering wall sconces, while the storm, quieter but still present, continued outside.

When we got back here, it was still raining, but in a good way, and while we did lose power for about 15 seconds, it came right back on.

The plans for the weekend include shopping local stores for the best prices on a washer and dryer, and taking the dogs out to really RUN.

For now, though, it’s nearly 1:30, and time to sleep.

Happy Friday.
Happy October.

::Against All Odds::

Onesome- Against: Is there anything you are vehemently opposed to? Or just something that gets you up on your soapbox?
I’m extremely pro-choice, anti-censorship, and anti-smoking in public places. I’ve put my body on the line for the first, the other two, well, sometimes I rant, and I make a point of buying “banned” books. Choice is the most personal, though. Oh, and leashes. I get really really pissy about people who don’t keep their dogs on leashes.

Twosome- All: Is there something that you have to give all or nothing to?
Actually, I don’t think there’s any aspect of my life in which I don’t hold something back.

Threesome- Odds: Are you a gambler? What would you bet on and for how much?
Only in the most literal sense of the word: I love horse racing and poker. Especially poker. But, without the cigars.
Continue reading →

I say… And you think…?

1. Diminishing::chord
2. Fed up:: politics
3. 3:00 AM:: writing time
4. Interfere:: meddle
5. Often:: enough
6. Hay:: sunshine
7. Prediction:: guess
8. Homophobia:: stupid
9. Booty call:: lust
10. Enunciate:: Hamlet

To go along with my suggestion of sticking Starbucks in 24/7 Kinkos, I would like to add:

Someone needs to create a telepathic library. As you enter, there would be a gentle scan of your brain. Maybe it’d be true telepathy, maybe more like Rowling’s legilemency, but the practical upshot would be that after you left the entry, a series of markers visible only to you would guide you to a shelf of books that were all EXACTLY what you wanted to read, but couldn’t define well enough to come up with titles.

Privacy would be assured, of course, and the scans would be limited to reading matter. No one would be skimming your brain for your atm code or phone number, or what the scale REALLY said when you looked down at it that morning.

I could have used such a feature this weekend, when we went into Half Price Books. I knew I wasn’t in the mood for more Darkover, that I wanted something cozy, with a plot, perhaps a mystery, that involved cute houses and a neat town. But, you know, bookstores refuse to categorize that way. It’s not possible to walk in and find the Cozy section.

I left without buying a single thing.

The fact that I woke on Monday with a headache and sore throat (which I still have) should come as no surprise. I mean, I have to be sick if I couldn’t find anything to read in a bookstore. Right?

Well, more like three cents a page. We spent the evening at the local 24/7 Kinko’s copying loan files for submission and popping them into FedEx. If Kinko’s had a Starbucks inside, I’d be completely in love with the place, even if the copiers don’t have sorters. They’re so FAST.

* * * * *

I haven’t been very social, online or off. I’m tired. I woke yesterday with a sore throat and a fever, and was sleepy and unfocussed all day. Fuzzy brought home NyQuil for me, and at least I got real sleep last night. A dose of DayQuil this morning kept me functioning til about two, at which point I crashed. Woke at six, and finished prepping for the Kinko’s run. Now it’s midnight, and I’m sleepy enough to sleep, but my mind is racing.

* * * * *

I’ve been reading a lot. Went through a stack of old Nora Roberts novels, a stray submarine novel, and now am back to Darkover novels, which I’m not really in the mood for, but it’s all we have. There’s a limit to the amount of fanfic I can read, partly because I don’t like reading WIPs and partly because my little laptop is being overworked. It’s putting out so much heat, in fact, that I was able to keep my coffee hot by placing it next to the vent. BUT my wifi keeps dying, so if we’re chatting, and I disappear, it’s not intentional.

* * * * *

Too tired to cook, we tried Steak-n-Shake tonight. I’d told Fuzzy that what I wanted most of all was grilled cheese and chilli, and they had both. Chilli is my new comfort food, even if it doesn’t start with a P ¹.

* * * * *
A solitary cricket managed to hitch a ride with one of the dogs, or with Fuzzy, and is now lurking under the bathroom counter. I nearly screamed when I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye, thinking it was a scorpion or a cockroach, not because I’m afraid of bugs, but because its presence startled me. Now I’m hoping it won’t chirp all night.

* * * * *
We have Alaska Airlines debit cards on our Texas BofA accounts, even though Alaska doesn’t fly here (I don’t think), because hey, free miles, and also it lets us tell the cards apart.

* * * * *
Cricket Update: It’s become Cleo’s playtoy. Go Cleo! Eat the bug!

¹ In one of the V.I. Warshawski novels, Sara Paretsky talks about all comfort foods beginning with P. (Pizza, pasta, pudding, etc.)