Beep

It's 12:30 AM, been asleep for 3 hours, something wakes me up.  Huh?  What?  I try to go back to sleep...........  Beep.  Shit!  Friggin smoke alarm.  Needs new battery.  Maybe I can sleep through it............  Beep............beep...........beep.  Nope, ain't gonna happen.  Trish is awake, too.  "I'll take care of it," I mumble, getting out of bed.

I get dressed, listen for the next beep to determine which one of the 6 usual suspects is the current offender, which turns out to be the one in Trish's sewing room.  I get the stepladder and a fresh 9 volt battery and install it.  No more beep.  But, I'm fully awake now so I turn on the coffee machine and do my usual wee-hours routine: email, online Scrabble, study my in-progress painting and determine next steps.

Smoke alarms have saved many lives I suppose, but man are they pain in the ass!  Besides being awakened by the beeps, the damned things go off whenever there's a tad bit of cooking smoke, making an incredibly loud and piercing noise, enough to wake the dead.

Dogs, with their sensitive hearing, really get nailed by the screeching.  They get traumatized and tremble like a bowl of jello being carried by a person with Parkinson's - or like the Ghost of Christmas Future just revealed that the world would run out of dog food next week.  It takes them nearly an hour to recover.  We solved the problem in the RV by simply removing the battery - but that wouldn't be a wise move in the house.

Several years ago, the state of Oregon added a statute to landlord/tenant law: all smoke alarms in residential rentals must have 10-year batteries.  The newer, long-life batteries are lithium; conventional alkaline batteries don't last nearly as long.  After changing out the bad battery, I recalled that OR statute, and decided to equip all 6 smoke alarms with lithium batteries.  Both Lowe's and Home Depot had them in stock at $6.50 each.  No beeps for 10 years.  Yes!

You're probably aware that lithium is used to treat numerous illnesses and mental conditions including bipolar, depression, anemia and anorexia.  However, I think medical lithium has a different formula than battery lithium, so if you're depressed, sucking on one of these batteries is unlikely to prove beneficial.  Nope, don't think you'd get a charge out of it.

I apologize for the screamingly obvious pun, tried to resist but just couldn't.