TALES FROM THE BOBBI LAMA

Last night the whole-house security alarm suddenly started blaring, which always rattles me even when it turns out to be nothing dangerous. It’s loud! The control box voice said the smoke alarm and the heat alarm both had low batteries, and they started chirping at the same time setting off the house alarm. That triggered the security company to call me to see if they needed to dispatch the fire department. I assured them there was no fire, and they instructed me on how to temporarily silence the whole-house alarm. That’s when the chirping from the two detectors took over. I got the ladder out to try to put in new batteries. I was able to do the smoke alarm, but not the heat alarm so I had to call my handyman someone for help for the next morning with the one I couldn’t remove from the wall. I had just decided to accept a loud chirp every minute throughout the night, when suddenly the NOAA alert radio went off to warn everyone in my neighborhood of a severe weather system moving in with flooding, high winds, and a tornado spotted. Now I’m double rattled to say the least. It felt like an evening of alarms was just adding to my already heightened sensitivities to danger after feeling so vulnerable from a scam recently. I decided to prepare our inner tornado escape room for the tornado, accept the night of chirps, and wait out the storm (as if I had a choice).

There ended up being no tornado, no lightening hit the house, and I was able to chill out and bring the blood pressure back down. This morning, however, I couldn’t help but wonder about the events of the evening. My husband passed a couple of years ago and he always took care of alarms and replacing batteries, so I’m still not sure why I have both smoke and heat detectors. I do know we always tried to remember to change the batteries, with me being the most forgetful. Her had always said he was worried I’d forget if he passed before me. The interesting thing is that I had just changed the battery in the smoke detector a couple of months ago. Hmm.

And now I have one more lingering question about last night… how could two different sets of batteries in two different, separate wireless detectors (one using using a 9 volt battery and one using AAA’s) happen to fail at the exact same moment in time? I can’t help but wonder how “on earth” that happened!