It's loud on purpose

On Saturday morning, after I was awake and watching TV but before my room-mate had started moving around, the smoke detector went off. This freaking thing is loud - really loud. And even worse is that all the detectors are tied together - when one goes off, they all go off. But, you can only reset them from the primary one going off.

Which is upstairs. So, I first tried fanning the air near the downstairs one, noticed it was a green light, then went upstairs and reached up to hit the button to silence the hall alarm.

Now, that's tough to do. The noise is so loud and intense that going towards the alarm is painful - the correct impulse is to go away from it. Quickly.

I went back downstairs to TV and paper folding - only to have the alarm go off again. Back upstairs to push the button. This time, I tried holding it in to see if it would reset. After a while, it seemed like it worked and the light turned green. Peace and quiet.

But it was not to last. The dang thing started going off again every 10 minutes or so - all the while I'm rushing up to silence it and hoping that it will clear itself and my room-mate (who's now awake and moving around) keeps talking about calling the maintenance guy and keeps not actually making the call. Finally, we track down the problem to a candle that had been left burning over night. Scary, but not too bad. We open up the apartment to the cool December to try and get rid of the smoke that we couldn't smell but was pissing of the detector. Our neighbor came over and showed us how to disconnect the detector and pull the battery to finally shut it up. We need to put it back, but the thought of that going off again makes my head hurt.

Did a little shopping over the weekend as well. The crowds were not too bad, parking was a little rough, and the lines were pretty intense. I'm pretty much done with my shopping and wrapping.

My recent origami project has been making wreaths. Each one takes 18 squares of paper. With the paper I had I was able to make 17 of them - 306 modules folded. I used glue to help hold them together and then added some ribbon. Strangely enough, I did this project without a clear idea of what to do with them or who to give them too. Eh, I'll figure it out - and I'll get a picture as well.

It's only 9:30 and I feel like I've been here at work for 17 hours already. Finals week was last week and things are very quiet around here now. I think it's going to be a long week.