Hey look at that, I actually made it through a whole month without abandoning this thing.  And now we're on to a new one.  Huzzah!

My fun adventure for today occurred a few minutes ago when one of the smoke detectors in our house started to periodically let out a loud and high-pitched beep.  No, the house wasn't on fire, it was just what these things do when the battery gets low.  Usually this seems to happen at about 3 AM and wakes me up, so it was fortunate it actually occurred during the day this time.  It has the not so great side effect of absolutely freaking our dogs out, which I totally understand because their hearing is more sensitive than ours and I think it's an ungodly awful noise.

The tricky part is determining which smoke detector is emitting the beep.  It seems like it would have been a good idea to include a bright flashing light in the design to make it very obvious which one has the low battery, but nope.  You have to walk around the house and wait for the beep to go off again and figure out which one it seems to be coming out of the loudest.  I finally figured out which one it was and went to grab a new battery.  In the meantime my dog George is clinging to me and literally trembling with fear.  I located the little stepladder, climbed up, popped out the old battery, put in the new one, dusted off my hands, and congratulated myself on a job well done.  I was folding up the stepladder when the damn thing beeped again.  

So I set the stepladder back up, climb up it, pop the battery out, try to determine if I inserted it the wrong way, spend several minutes trying to insert it every which way before concluding there's only one way that it fits, put it back in that way and in the meantime the thing keeps beeping the entire time.  Poor George is shaking in terror and I'm trying to assure him that the horrible sound will go away soon, but I'm decidedly not delivering on that promise.

I know I put a brand new battery in the thing because I just got it out of the package, but before I resort to ripping the damn smoke detector out of the ceiling, I decide to try inserting a different new battery in.  At long last this seems to satisfy it.  I don't know what was wrong with the first battery.  It was the exact same voltage.  Apparently the smoke detector didn't like it.  It took several minutes of holding George to calm him down and he's still sticking around right by my feet to be on the safe side. 

That's plenty of excitement for today as far as I'm concerned.  Here's to keeping things boring.