In the deep of the night

Friday:

In the deepest darkest silence of last night, there came a beeping.

I woke to this insistent, loud BEEP BEEP BEEP. My first thought was the smoke alarm so I jumped up and checked that. No. My second thought was the security system, which I have never actually heard in ten years here (we may have tested it when we first moved in, I don't remember) so I woke my husband and we went to investigate together. No intruders, but still the BEEP BEEP BEEP definitely inside the house. Tim didn't get home from work until midnight, so we were both staggering around confused and half asleep, but tracked it down to the hot water tank.

There is a black box attached low, with a cord leading to a disc in the drip tray. We had this new hot water tank installed only three months ago, and from what I could remember this was to detect leaks. But the drip tray was dry, no leak anywhere. There was a big green button on the black, flashing box so we tried pressing that for various time periods. It would shriek at us then go back to BEEP BEEP BEEP drilling into my precarious sanity.

Our daughter was awake by now, somehow our son slept through it. Just like his daddy. I can't even sleep through a dripping tap, let alone this. We tried to turn the hot water system off. Unfortunately we had no idea how to do this. Tim went out to the switch and tried turning everything off in turn. We lost all the lights and power, but not the f*cking beeping. It would not stop. We both searched the Internet. Aside from water leakage, it could have been overheating or one other thing I keep forgetting.

After a frustrating hour, we rang our plumber's 24 hour hotline. Unfortunately this just meant we woke a nice receptionist who told us a plumber would call back in the morning. Eventually some more research revealed that the alarm ran off a battery to I was able to pull that out and stop the damn noise. We turned off the power to the house, just in case that helped contain whatever was wrong, and finally went back to bed. Where I lay awake feeling exhausted and miserable.

The plumber came about 3pm and revealed that the alarm was faulty, he'll be back with the part next week and in the meantime we just left the batteries out.

I spent the day with no power which was a bit of a challenge. I had breakfast in a cafe after driving Tim to work, but no cups of tea at home. Or computer. Or TV. I was supposed to go shopping, but was not about to buy perishables with the fridge turned off. All course it turned out all this was unnecessary, but we didn't know that until late afternoon. Indian take-away for dinner.

Creating a certain symmetry, there was a fire alarm at Jasmine's ballet class this evening and the whole school was halfway out before it was turned off and we came back in, another false alarm. My long day ended much as it started, with the sound of that bloody BEEP BEEP BEEP.

Report card:
Diet: Poor. Take-away and cafe. Some digestive upset and queasiness which may be from lack of sleep or whatever has been wrong with me this week or both.
Exercise: Poor. Felt pretty unwell much of the day, again maybe lack of sleep contributing. Just walking from the car into ballet school was as much as I could handle.
Water: Poor. I did try, but queasy makes it hard.
Sleep: Terrible.
Mental health: Ok I guess. I know it was just one bad night.