The Sweet Life

Wanna hear our big-time adventure last week?  We thought we were going to die.  No, maybe that's an exaggeration.  I tend to over-react sometimes.  Here's the story....

Last Wednesday I woke up to this loud beeping noise that sounded like a smoke detector except that it only gave 4 beeps and then stopped.  I stumbled out of bed and realized that we have a carbon monoxide detector in the hall and I wondered if that was what I had heard.  So I groggily looked at it but, still being half asleep and having idea how to use it, I just ran my hands along it and ended up pushing a button.  It beeped again, just once, so I decided maybe it wasn't the carbon monoxide detector that I had heard.  So I walk around the house looking at all the smoke detectors to see if there were any flashing lights.  Then the beeping happened again.  I had no idea where it was coming from, but it did sound like it was coming from the hallway and all I could see was the carbon monoxide detector.  As I continued to wake up I started to panic because carbon monoxide is a big deal.  So I called Tyler at work.  He didn't answer but I kept calling back until he did. By the time I got a hold of him I was wide awake and my brain was actually functioning.  I opened all the windows in the house and got Jamison up (amazingly enough, he'd slept through the noise).  After talking to Tyler, I packed a bag of things I'd need for the day and took Jamison to camp out at my parents' house (even though they weren't home).  I wasn't taking any chances.

When Tyler got off work he checked out the house and the detector.  He read the instructions and the detector should have continued to beep every 5 seconds as long as it detected a threat.  But then again, I may have reset it when I started playing with it.  Tyler told me that the second beeping I had heard came from pushing the reset button.  He closed the windows and waited but nothing ever happened.  He also checked the batteries and they seemed fine.  So he decided it was probably okay for us to come home.  Of course he told our landlord (who is in town working on his other son's basement and Tyler is also helping do that...) who told us to just keep an eye on it. 

That night at about 12:30 it went off again.  Just once again, not beeping every 5 seconds or anything.  Not knowing what we could do at such a late hour we just turned off the heater (since we assumed that's the only thing we could get it from) and opened our windows.  It was cold but luckily we have lots of blankets.  Again, Jamison slept through the whole thing.  Such a blessing!  Tyler called our landlord first thing in the morning and let him know.  I stayed home because our landlord was going to come check it out.  We kept the windows open and the heater off until he came.  He checked all the possibilities and finally decided that it was just a faulty detector and possibly needed new batteries.  Since then everything has been fine but it was certainly scary for a while.  I read up on carbon monoxide and panicked about Jamison getting some sort of horrible side effect and having permanent brain damage.  Thankfully we're all fine, we have heat again, and the carbon monoxide detector is behaving.  Phew!