It's been a busy day. First a doctor appointment, then a "symposium" on arthritis at a Red Lobster, then we got home late and while I was trying to do stuff online the carbon monoxide detector began going off. We loaded Jasmine into her carrier (she was not happy about this), grabbed cell phones and purses, and evacuated the house before calling 911. The good news is we have no carbon monoxide. The bad news is we need a new CO detector - it seems one of the things they do is beep to tell you they're dead. The worse news is that there's another CO detector around here, bought at the same time as the first, and it is also going off but I can't find it!!! I believe I'll be up most of the night trying to track down the beeps. And once we replace these I'm darn well going to write down exactly where we plug the new ones in so I don't have to search for them this way in a decade or so.
And now I'm hungry again. I think I'll make a snack before I really get into the great beep hunt.
I'm triumphant, because I finally found the beep. It was coming from the carbon monoxide detector that the firemen had just unplugged! It turns out that, in addition to plugging into a wall outlet, CO detectors use batteries (). And in addition to sounding an expiration date alarm, they'll sound an alarm when they need new batteries. After reading the description of the various alarms on the back of the CO detector I concluded that what we got last night was actually a battery alarm rather than an expiration date alarm. I put two fresh AA batteries in it and pressed the reset button, and it suddenly became very quiet. From other information on the back it appears that this CO detector will actually expire in about three years.