Memorials and Elusive Beeping

Yesterday started out as a rather stressful day with worrying about a friend having surgery, and remembering that it was also the 20th anniversary of both my grandmother's death, and coincidentally the first bombing of the World Trade Centers in New York.  Twenty years ago, I was 8, and I still distinctly remember getting the call that grandma had passed away. My mom took the call, I was sitting at the table. I knew, as soon as my mom picked up the phone that she had passed away, and while we knew it was coming, that didn't help the mourning process much. My grandmother was an amazing woman who still lives on in our memories and through the lives of her children and grandchildren. I was touched to find out that my mom had put this memorial in the paper.

I also wrote about 13 of my memories of my grandmother here.

After a morning spent worrying about my friend, I was taking solace in the guitar lesson I had coming up at 8pm.  I take Skype lessons with this amazing musician who lives in Nashville, and his eternal optimism, and quirky humor always put me in a good mood. I've missed the last couple of weeks because of illness, and darn it, I really wanted my lesson! Then, thirty minutes before my lesson...the power went out.  

I get that it was raining, and the wind did blow hard enough to knock a cooler off of our porch table, but it was not bad enough for the power to go out, especially when we have underground lines, and for the third time it was only my row of townhomes and the ones across the street that lost power.

So now I'm missing my guitar lesson, my phone is almost dead and suddenly the smoke detector lets out a persistent beeeep. I at least managed to find the flashlights without killing myself.  My husband seems to like to hide them in randomly labeled boxes in the basement. This works really well...in the dark. Then I sat down and played the guitar. I only know two songs, so I serenaded the cats...in the dark. It was romantic.  

About ten minutes later the husband came home and he was quite keen on the idea of a romantic dinner in the dark. He so kindly finds, and makes the chirping smoke detector shut up.  A neighbor texted me that the power would be back by 10:30. I emailed my guitar teacher, plugged my phone into my computer, and my husband read me short SciFi stories about peace until we got tired...which was around 9:30pm.  We headed upstairs for an early bedtime, and boom...the power comes back on. Sweet! All is well...right?  

Of course not.  The smoke detector started chirping again.  I let the husband deal with it, and hear him swearing from across the house, "grumble grumble, tearing it from ceiling...mutter mutter grumble."

"Uhhh...let me look at it!" is my response.  Let's just say, the 'shut the hell up' button wasn't working, the test button made it go off, and we ended up taking it down, and happily retiring to our room.  Beeeeeeep, we hear. Um...omg is there another one going off now?  At this point I just lay my head down on the bed and laugh. 

We decided to split up and check the two other rooms on the floor, each of us standing in our offices.  beeeep! We hear again. I'm adamant that it didn't come from my office, he adamant that it didn't come from his.  I lost the argument and we hear it again, quieter this time. beeeeep? It seems more like a question now than a demand.  We're at a loss...and suddenly my husband  suddenly had a Sherlock moment, throws up his arms and yells, "I've got it! Residual power...that's why it's getting quieter." And then walks out of the room to our bedroom.  

Yeah...I told you it wasn't coming from my office.  

I also learned last night that if you go to bed at 9:30 and read for two hours, it may feel like 1:30am, but it's really only 11:30.  I also learned that if my husband wants to snore loudly while sleeping on his back, I have no qualms about sending him to sleep on the guest bed, which was conveniently made up already.  I slept quite well, and have no idea when he came back to bed.

Apparently my life is too boring, because this morning at the dentists, when they went to replace a crown (apparently the one they put in never fit correctly), and gave me anesthesia, the epinephrine made my heart rake spike, and me almost pass out.  I have never felt so weird in my life. I couldn't take a breath, or focus, and my heart was beating so hard I thought it was going to explode.  So not fun. Then, as she was drilling off the crown, I started getting really woozy again and they had to give me oxygen. I hate being 'difficult' but this appointment, even though I love my dentist and her assistant, really stunk.  Luckily the temp crown doesn't seem to be causing me trouble, and my molds look good. They took five. Any more and I think my teeth would have been pulled from my head. Here is my blog post from my first visit to get my crown. The nice lady wasn't the first lady who screwed up my crown. I only ask for the nice lady. She's really nice.

Now I'm back to making a disaster area out of my living room as I pull things out of the closet for the swap. I'm getting excited!