Spring is here! How can I tell? The smoke alarm in my bedroom goes off when I'm done with my shower.
I wish it were signaling how "smoking" I look in my jade towel reaching into my underwear drawer, but that is so not the case. If anything, it's warning the neighbors "na-ked Rob! Na-ked Rob! Na-ked Rob! Shield your eyes! Shield your eyes! Retina dam-age! Retina dam-age!" It's happened. Just ask the carpet cleaning salesperson who came to my door. They haven't been back since.
Still this isn't really what the alarm means. The alarm means it's spring. I've reversed the ceiling fan, and the changed air-flow blows the steam from the bathroom back up to the alarm.
If I leave the bathroom door open while I shower, it'll go off while I'm in there. Sort of like an antagonistic timer. "Way too long! Way too long! Way too long!" It's annoying. Still like every other annoying thing, I either need to find a way around it, or find a way to cope.
The smoke alarm falls in the "cope" category. I could take it down, but with my luck, that just means there'd be a fire in my bedroom. Yeah, I know, I'm not holding my breath for that either. That's why I leave the alarm. Besides, if there's a fire in my bedroom, I'm gonna want the fanfare. I have the alarm, and a marching band on speed dial.
So on days like yesterday, where it feels like everything is beating down on me, I try to let the alarm know it's not going to get the best of me. Yesterday I'd spent the whole day rebuilding my computer. It took the whole day to turn the little box of beeps and whirrs into a functioning member of society. Some of my attempts at rehabilitation were unsuccessful. Who'd have thought plugging a scanner back into the USB port would cause the whole system to crash three times. I blame HP. I'd blame MyUnwife, but she wasn't here.
Finally I get the thing running, and I'm reloading my iTunes library. It tells me it's going to take an hour to move all the music from backup, I figure this is a good time for a shower. I feel beat. I swear, rebuilding a computer is like fighting with a spouse. It's bitter and unorganized, and in the end, your still not sure you've accomplished anything but making each other angry.
"I told you I wanted the back ground to be the cover of Ziggy Stardust, why do you keep choosing the blue screen of death? Do you know how that makes me feel? You're putting up a wall..."
I felt dirty. I set the shower head to "acupuncture" and let the water needles impale my back. Half way through, the alarm goes off. It's a series of high pitch beeps:
Beep! Beep! Beep!
It's like a 4 year old banging out Jingle Bells on their color keyed piano. You know, red, red, red. Red, red, red. Red, blue, yellow, green, red…That's how my alarm sounds. So to cope I start singing "Jin-gle bells, Jin-gle bells…" along with the alarm. It must have confused it, because it paused after "all the way." I yelled at it to keep up, but it must have lost it's place. It tried again a little later, and we got further.
The third verse I believe, because that's when my neighbor burst in. I think between all the beeping and squealing, my neighbor thought there was a fire in the bedroom; they busted through the door to save the day. Unfortunately for them they didn't stop before rounding into the bathroom.
"Oh, my eyes! My eyes!"
Now the alarm is screaming "Eye damage! Eye damage!"
Yeah, I wrapped my neighbor in gauze and sent them home. The doctor says the vision may come back, but they'll need corrective lenses. He said the neighbor was lucky, the steam probably blurred the vision enough to save his life.
Ok, the neighbor part didn't really happen, but it should have. We all need something to stretch us a bit. In this case, I've chosen the truth to stretch. MyUnwife used to stretch me. We used to laugh at the shower alarm too. It was annoying but we coped. Now I sing my own shower songs. They're a little atonal and short on repertoire, but there's nobody around to make requests, so I'll sing what I want.
Its what I do. It's what we all do. We build new patterns, and we find new ways to cope and to have fun. I love to laugh, and I enjoy singing. If you like these things too, go climb in your shower and sing along. Maybe you can set off an alarm of your own.
"Jin-gle bells. Jin-gle bells…."
My biggest fan.
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