project 365 #175: grass and tree

project 365 #175: grass and tree
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday we were supposed to go out to Bat Cave and thence to Lake Lure to take pictures of fat tourists. And we (me and S and puppy Mojo) made it to Bat Cave to visit with our friend D but we didn't make it back down the mountain and into Lake Lure. It was just too nice up there sitting on D's porch drinking beer and talking and being continually buzzed by hummingbirds and watching the dogs play so instead of fat tourists I was forced to take pictures of, like, Nature and shit. Sheesh. It was very relaxing and great and there was even a nice afternoon thunderstorm. Then S & I came back into Asheville where we met C for dinner at the Westville and then went over to his house to admire his garden. I confess, after D's & C's gardens this weekend, I am feeling terrible garden envy and am almost, but not quite, tempted to dig up some of the back forty and see what I can get to grow in this mostly dry almost July. I feel lame only having a few containers of plants and like my Earth Mother cred is all getting ruined.

So everything was nice and mellow and I went to bed at a reasonable hour and all, only to be awakened by the forever damned smoke alarm outside my bedroom at 3:30 this morning. It was really going off, none of that low battery chirping, no, the full throttle wail siren "you are going to die!" mode. I leaped out of bed and got on a kitchen chair and disconnected it and then took the battery out and then spent the next two hours in a state of terrible heightened paranoia whereby I was sure that even though I could smell no smoke whatsoever no matter how hard I strained my nose and also poked it into places where it didn't want to go like the attic crawl space and behind the bookcases just in case, horrors, an electrical outlet had suddenly decided to go berserk and caught randomly on fire, the house was nonetheless on fire and about to kill me and the dogs. Around 5:00 am I decided that if the house had actually been on fire for over two hours I probably would have noticed some change in my environment so I drifted back off to sleep only to wake up again at 9:00 - I am theoretically supposed to be at work at 9:00. I hate Mondays. I hate possessed smoke alarms. The internet tells me that it may have been the humidity that set the damn thing off in which case I guess I am doomed for the rest of the summer.

This has happened to me once before - I had mercifully forgotten the last possessed smoke detector in my life. That was in the bat infested farmhouse in northern Baltimore county where we lived in the late 90s and it also happened in the small hours of the morning not long after we moved in. It was actually worse, though, in that the kids and my boyfriend were all there as well and I believe that M, who was quite small, was frightened and crying and A, who had just started high school, was yelling as she often did and the dog was barking and I'm sure, although I don't remember it, that the cats, of which we had many then, were underfoot. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was wobbling unsteadily on a chair at the top of the stairs trying to disconnect the smoke alarm. Which finally he did, which did not faze the smoke alarm one iota. No, it just kept right on wailing away even though we had pulled the battery out. Then we had to disconnect it from the wall by main force and even then, with no power source whatsoever, it continued to shriek. I remember a conversation between me and said boyfriend about whether we would actually set the house on fire or perhaps electrocute ourselves if we just cut the damn wires with a pair of scissors, goddamnit. I swear to you that this is true. Not only did it never shut up, but then we chucked it far, far out the window towards the woods and you could still hear it chirping distantly which is why I found myself, soon after the sun rose, burying a smoke alarm deep in the earth by the state forest. I felt like a murderer - a very tired murderer who had really pretty much had it up to here with the murdering business.