A Nuisance

Yesterday evening the smoke alarm on the second floor of our home died. We heard that annoying chirp alerting us that a new battery was needed. The Quipper pulled a chair into the hallway and unhooked the cover. I retrieved a new battery and the camera. "Only home schoolers would bother to document this activity", I think to myself, hoping I'll never be called upon to prove I teach fire safety even while I prepare to be able to do just that. The new battery goes in and out comes an eardrum piercing shriek. Not the test button's signal, but a solid, shrill squeal that would wake the neighbors.

With his eyes in a heavy squint, as if that instinctive reflex could protect his ears, the Quipper grabs the battery and yanks in out. "Great," he says. "Its broken. Now we all have to sleep downstairs."

My mind screams over the memory of the shriek -- No! Not Great! The Quipper has to get up at a fiendish hour in the morning to catch a flight!

So I ask the Quipper to put the old battery back in. Chirp........chirp........chirp.

And the new one... EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! (How could I have done that to him?)

Then the Quipper makes a proclamation to me: You need to buy a new smoke detector tomorrow. (And to the Artist) Tonight you can sleep downstairs. The Engineer has taken to leaving his bed between 5 and 6 a.m. and settling to sleep of the living room sofa. I guess a sleeping sister did not disturb him. Here is how I found them this morning (at that inhuman hour) when the Quipper left for the airport. Yesterday the Artist fell in love with a knitting project I saw at Lotzastitches. Thank you for linking to the bunny pattern! Here she is making her first gauge swatch. She is not excited by the idea of making swatches. Here she is working on the fourth row, and after she did the cast on I did the first two rows for her! Her casting on comes out too tight for her to manage the first row of knitting, so I helped out. Progress on my first glove in slow. Saturday night I had about an hour and a half to knit. After about 30 minutes I realized I had made an error in the place where you make the opening for the thumb. The instructions did not say to break the yarn, but I realized later I would need to do this or else I'd have a string trailing across the opening. Perhaps I could tack it to the inside of the opening after the thumb was complete? No -- not enough slack to have it rest around the gap. It was a taut bisection of the circular opening. Too short to even ( dare I mention the thought that crossed my mind?) it was even too short to snip and knot. I spent the next hour undoing the previous half hour's work. Rats. Sunday evening I got to make forward progress again!