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Beep! Yesterday afternoon one of the smoke alarms started the intermittant beeping that indicates when the battery is getting low. These are smoke alarms that are actually wired directly into the electrical system of the house, but have nine-volt batteries in them for backup (in case the power goes out). No biggie, I knew we had newer batteries.

Beep! Well, a bigger task then I thought; I couldn't figure out at first which smoke alarm was beeping. We have a total of seven in the house, one down at the bottom of the stairs and six others upstairs. And due to the acoustics in our house, I was moving from one alarm to another waiting for the telltale beep, but everytime I'd get close to one the Beep! would chirp out, seemingly from behind me.

Beep! I finally traced it to the smoke alarm in my bedroom. Popped out the battery, replaced it with a fresh one. All good, the beeping stopped. Case closed. Had dinner, went to bed.

Beep! Wha—? Huh? I roll over in bed, echoes from whatever dream I'd been having shredding away in the onset of consciousness. Peer at the clock; 4:40. In the morning.

The hell—?

Beep! Oh, shit. Another smoke alarm is warning me its battery is too low. I do not want to get out of bed for this—

Beep! Beep! Uhhhh... If I'm not mistaken, that was two different beeps. Son of a bitch.

Beep! So for the next 30 or 40 minutes I'm stumbling around the house, tring to catch a smoke alarm in the act, failing miserably, swapping out fresh batteries only to find I don't quite have enough because I just know that all the damn batteries have chosen 5:00 in the morning to sputter out, and all the while Beep! Beep! and I can't figure out which ones are chirping.

Beep! Screw this, I get vicious and pull the batteries out of all the smoke alarms. They're wired anyway, and I'll just buy brand new batteries tomorrow to make sure I'm covered.

...Did it work? Did the beeps stop? Looks like I was—

Beep! No. No no no nonononononononononononono.

It dawns on me that we have a carbon monoxide detector plugged in to the wall in the hallway. It's supposed to beep when it detects high levels of CO gas... and I think there's a battery in it too.

Check it... sure enough, the damn thing says "Err" on it's tiny beeping fu—ahem, LCD screen. Okay, pull the detector, pull the battery, and...

Silence.

Ever notice how peaceful it is at 5:45 in the morning?

Since moving into the new house, it seems like there's a never-ending list of things to do. This weekend it was staining the new fence. That took a big chunk of time.

The way to go when doing something like staining a fence (or a deck) is to get a compression sprayer—a plastic tank that you pour the liquid into, seal airtight and pump air into. This creates pressure that forces the liquid out of the spray nozzle when triggered. Pretty handy, but here's some things you might want to consider doing if you're doing this (all of which I, of course, didn't do):

• Wear goggles. The sealant/stain spray has an amazing tendency to blow back into your eyes when it's windy.
• Wear a mask to avoid inhaling too many fumes.
• Wear a hat, like a painter's cap. Especially during those blowback situtations.

So I put together a Costco shed today, with help from my dad. Part of our grand plan to outfit the new house with all the bling bling, you know. It's a nice shed, but it was a pain in the ass to get set up. Actually, the shed itself wasn't that bad, it's all plastic and rubbermaid-type material. The worst part was setting up a "foundation" for the thing on a slightly-sloped part of the yard that backs up to the fenceline. We found some sturdy pallets in the dumpster across the street that fit the bill, after levelling them off with cinder bricks, flat stone and two-by-four shims.

Yeah, we did some dumpster diving. But it's the big construction dumpster for the development we're in, filled with lots of usable scrap wood and stuff! That makes it okay. :)