The Blissful Sound of Silence

There's really not much noteworthy news here, but that's made for a lovely, relaxing weekend. I finally made the roasted cauliflower again for dinner last night along with a bite-sized version of chicken picatta with pasta.

Boy was that a dumb move. It was 80° in the house and not only did I have the oven on, but I was boiling water for the pasta, and cooking the chicken in a separate pan. All at the same time.

Dumb, dumb move. But it was easy, fairly quick, and yummy. We'll either have the leftovers for lunch and a salad for dinner or the other way around today, but I'm definitely not cooking over a hot stove/oven today.

So a while back, we'll say 8 weeks or so, about the time we started sleeping with our bedroom window open, I began noticing a small chirping noise at night while in bed. I asked Scoob if he could hear it, but he said he couldn't and I couldn't figure out what it was. I thought it might be some kind of bird, but the chirps were too regular. So maybe it was an alarm of some kind. At any rate, it was a fairly quiet noise and I began to tune it out.

The last couple of weeks the chirping has gotten louder and Scoob can now hear it. It's been driving him nuts and he hasn't been sleeping well because of it. So Friday evening we began to investigate where it was coming from. Our townhouse units are so packed together it was almost impossible to tell, but Scoob determined it was coming from the patio next to our bedroom patio.

When Scoob talked to the neighbors living there, they said they hadn't noticed a thing, but when he went back they admitted that it was their smoke detector. It was the low battery warning. Scoob explained to them that if they don't change the battery, the smoke detector will not work in the event of a fire, and in that case there's really not much sense in having the detector, so please, either change the battery or disconnect the detector. They seemed rather surprised by this concept. Go figure.

Anyhow, they changed the battery and we've had two blissfully chirpless nights. What I don't get is how (or why) they (and their two small children) lived with that noise for at least 8 weeks and didn't seem to be bothered at all by it. If it was loud enough for us to hear in a completely separate building, I can only imagine how loud it must have been inside the home.