So some days I manage to read DW and more days I don't, but I'm going to try to reverse that ratio.
Let me tell you, very quickly, two stories about late-night interactions with public safety officials—all happy endings:
1) The CO/smoke detector in SteelyKid's room wouldn't stop beeping even after I changed the batteries, so the nice fire fighters came and ran their detectors all around and kindly told me that the units tend to have a lifespan of 7-10 years. (She's 7. We installed the monitor shortly before she was born.) I felt alternately foolish and vindicated for having called them out on a weekend night.
The good news there is that thanks to California, you can now buy CO/smoke detectors with 10-year batteries in them, so you never have to change them. We bought three the next day and I put replacing them in my reminder program.
2) It's 2:45 a.m. on Sunday night (Monday morning) and I haven't been to sleep yet because stress and wakeful Pip and a rotten headache. And I think I hear a quiet knocking, maybe on the front door? I bolt upright, and listen hard, and just as I'm deciding I was mistaken and am lying back down, I hear it again. It's definitely someone knocking on the front door.
I freak out and wake up Chad, which is unkind of me because he has a terrible time going back to sleep and because someone with ill intent isn't going to be knocking on the front door (we live in suburbia with two cars in the driveway, so it's not like a burglar checking for occupancy), but I was beyond rational thought by that point.
Turns out it was just the cops, who'd seen that the sliding doors in Chad's minivan were open and wanted him to check if there was anything missing/damaged. (There wasn't. It was almost certainly an unlucky bump of the remote, which can open the sliding doors, and which he keeps in a pocket.) I mean, I appreciate it, but couldn't they have shut the doors and left a note?!
And that's some slices of life in Chateau Steelypips.
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