Alarums and excursions

I had a much more important post lined up to write today, about Book Aid International and how all-round wonderful they are, but that is going to have to wait till tomorrow - our anniversary night has left me exhausted.

NOT in the way you were thinking. Honestly. Minds out of the gutter.

LOML and I woke up to a loud and repeated screeching noise at about 12:30am. We went through the usual woken-up-suddenly midnight checklist - is there a burglar? Am I sick/dying? Is partner/cat sick/dying? - until we realised that the noise was coming from our smoke detector. It was absolutely deafening. I still can't quite hear properly today. Mink hid somewhere in the apartment (the noise must have been so much louder to his sensitive ears) and we tried to get the smoke alarm open so that we could figure out how to stop it. That is, until we opened the front door and realised that the entire building's fire alarms were going off, complete with flashing white lights, and that all the other residents were opening their doors as well to see where the noise was coming from.

There followed a long period of standing barefoot in a bathrobe on the road outside the apartment building with our entire building's worth of people and animals ("I think I've met you in the elevator before. I didn't recognise you straight away because you were wearing clothes then") waiting for the fire department to arrive. And then finding out, as we suspected, that it was a false alarm. It was pretty interesting seeing what people chose to save from the 'fire' (apart from living things, of course): we had our passports and wallets, and most people had something along those lines, but one family hauled out a couple of giant transparent cases filled with random household objects. Like blankets and a painting of a boat. I am not that organised, although I did have some Kleenex in my bathrobe pocket and I remembered to put my contacts in, so I suppose I would have survived for a few hours.

Today we are all very grumpy and tired, and local coffee sales have risen by 75%.

So I'll see you tomorrow.