The Haunted Mini-Mansion

There is something funky going on around here, and I'm not quite sure what's up. After my mild tirade about the overly-sensitive smoke detector, things have been acting up.

First of all, I have the loudest dishwasher in captivity, and I just realized last night that it can overpower Rob's thousand-watt 5.1 digital surround system. Seriously--don't even try to watch TV in this place while running the dishwasher. I think it's probably quieter on the deck of an aircraft carrier during combat ops than it is in our living room.

Since you're gonna ask anyways, Whirlpool.

Then, last evening I walked into my bedroom and flipped the light switch and it immediately popped the light bulb in my Christmas Story leg-lamp. It went off like a supernova--a brilliant flash followed by immediate darkness. And I have no idea where the spare light bulbs are packed. I'm guessing they're deep in the inaccessible reaches of the storage closet, buried under a half ton of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid totes. So I've been blogging in darkness for the most part, with only the glow of the monitor and the dim light from the closet providing illumination in my bedroom.

But that's not all.

Around 6:00 am this morning, while sitting here drinking my coffee, the smoke detector in my bedroom decided to go off for about ten seconds. It scared the shiat out of me, because there was nothing cooking at the time. I jumped up and checked the kitchen, living room, hallway, and bathroom to make sure there was nothing on fire, and as suddenly as it came on, it turned itself off.

I refilled my coffee cup, settled back down at the desk, and got back to looking at dirty pictures reading the morning news, and the damn thing went off again. It wasn't one of those 'Hey, time to change the batteries' chirps--it was a full-on Call-the-fire-department-and-get-the-hell-out alarm. What made it especially bad is that Rob was trying to sleep at the time, so I'm sure he thinks I'm the worst cook ever. (Yeah, his recipe for toast is to wait until it smokes and then scrape off the black! --R. Dangerfield)

But I wasn't cooking. My only guess is that our damn smoke detectors are so sensitive that they picked up the steam from my coffee cup. (The one in my room is attached to the ceiling directly over my desk).

Holy shiat! Here it is 9:53 am--and as soon as I typed that last sentence, it just did it AGAIN!

No coffee right now, either. Time to call the maintenance guys and have them come fix these things before they suffer from blunt-force trauma. What a pain in the ass.

Mikey