Alarming!

A couple days ago I was baking muffins (lemon poppy seed to be exact, but not germane to the story) when our smoke detector went off. Now our smoke detector has not gone off once in the few short years we have lived here and it was ingeniously placed not directly over the stove as in some houses, but in the hallway so my cooking should have nothing to do with it. Besides, I would take great offense if somehow my cooking had offended the delicate sensors in the smoke detector!

The thing is that when one of the detectors goes off, it sets off all SEVEN in the house. So I had seven smoke detectors going off simultaneously. To say that it was loud was quite an understatement. Mr. Clean immediately searched the house for the cause of the smoke, finding nothing. So the natural course of action? Take whatever is available (in our case one of K.Z.'s workbooks) and fan the tar out of the detector until your arms hurt. Nope. Mr. Clean grabbed a huge box fan and turned it on full blast while opening the windows. Nope. Mr. Clean kicked the big box fan. Nope. Gromit barked at the detector. Nope. It's piercing sound was destined to render us permanently deaf. This went of for about 10 minutes until Mr. Clean, quite out of ideas, disconnected all seven smoke detectors. Sweet Victory!

Now before you cheer loudly keep in mind that Mr. Clean may be a mild manner white collar man during the day, but afterward he turns into Mr. Clean, Super Firefighter (I have the life insurance policy to prove it). So for a firefighter to disconnect a smoke alarm? I am sure many a man of steel are "tsk tsking" right now. Later that night he reconnected six of them but left the hallway detector on the counter in shame.

Last night after a dose of my beautiful cough syrup with codeine (again I must say, "God bless my doctor") I drifted off to dreamland with no fear of waking up to a wracking cough. In my dream someone warned me that something they were going to do might be loud, but the details of my dream are fuzzy. I woke suddenly to the sound of six smoke detectors going off at 05:30! At this point there is nothing to do but assure my screaming children (all three) that, "no the house was not going to burn down" while wondering why none of them had jumped out of bed and fled to "the tree", our meeting place in case of fire! We will have to work on that later.

Once again, Mr. Clean searched the house and then disconnected the detectors (this time muttering things under his breath I am sure would have to be censored). The kids and I went back to sleep. Mr. Clean had way too much adrenaline mixed with testosterone to let the situation get the best of him and go back to bed. He was a man on a mission.

Two and a half hours later when I rolled out of bed he had diagnosed and make a plan to correct the problem. I am happy to report that now we have seven reconnected smoke detectors. Pray that they don't go off again for the fear that it may send my hubby over the edge!