Why I hate smoke alarms

Number of times something in my house has actually been on fire: zero.

Number of times the smoke alarms have decided to go off and off and off anyway: TOO MANY.

I turned on my little countertop electric grill to cook some chicken breasts for dinner tonight, and just as it got hot enough to put on the meat, the infinitesimal, barely-noticeable amount of smoke the non-stick cooking spray gave off set off the smoke alarm. And, of course, we have the super-safe, wired-together, if-one-goes-off-they-all-go-off kind of smoke alarms, so within a matter of seconds, five smoke alarms were piercing my eardrums. As aforementioned, I was in the middle of cooking dinner and couldn't leave the rice I was making to go out into the garage, move everything out of the way, and carry in the ladder to reach the 10-foot ceilings and turn the stupid thing off, so we just sat there and listened to the smoke alarms bleep for 20 minutes straight until I could put the lid on the skillet and leave it to simmer.

Then, even when I did get the ladder and climb up to push the button, it kept blaring again for a few seconds and shutting itself off over and over again every few minutes for an hour. This, with the windows open on to the thirty-degree weather and every fan in the house on to disperse the "smoke." That's the kind of day this was.

So, yeah, I forgot about updating the blog until after midnight. Through the magic of backdating, this will still count as Thursday's post. So, ha.

(Faith actually managed to fall asleep on the couch directly under the offending smoke alarm while it was in its after-throes and never woke up. She sleeps hard.)