Maggie Shayne--Working the Bugs Out

Good news, folks! Not only does the Sentry security system in my new home work like a charm, but the fire department’s response time is about five minutes. Isn’t that great? You see, I burned some pancakes the other morning and uh—yeah, you guessed it. The alarm sounds like something you’d expect to hear if your local nuclear power plant blew a gasket. As it went off, I quickly ran to the spot where the former owner had left me a note telling me exactly what to do if this should happen. Punch in the code, hit RESET, and stay off the phones. Okay.

I punched in the code. The alarm stopped. I hit Reset. WEEE-WOOO, WEEE-WOOO, WEEE-WOOO. I hit the code again, it stopped. I hit Reset. It howled. I guess I hadn’t cleared out all the smoke yet. Meanwhile, the company was trying to call to verify the fire, but they still had the former owner’s number, not mine. We hadn’t switched things over yet. Yikes. I finally hit the code, and did not hit reset. I just let it go. It stopped, and stayed stopped, but that meant the system wasn’t active. And five minutes later, the fire department was knocking on my front door. As I explained what had happened, they laughed, and I asked if the entire town was going to know every time I burned breakfast, and they laughed some more.

I think from now on, I’ll disarm the device anytime I plan to cook. My kids used to joke that the smoke alarm was the dinner bell at our house. I have improved, mind you, but it’s probably still best to take precautions.

I got that issue all worked out with a call to Sentry, a tutorial, a cleaning of the smoke detector and a new battery for the system since I’d worn mine out by making it scream so many times.

The next fun issue was when the power went out one afternoon, just before dusk. I sprang into action, quickly noting the things I needed to do. First, go down cellar and see if a breaker had kicked off. But it was already pitch dark down there. Okay, revisions are my forte. First, get a light, because it would be dark upstairs as well soon and I wouldn’t be able to find one. So I located a battery powered lantern, made sure it was charged and working. Second, find a phone that works without electricity. Fortunately, there were several older phones around the house. So I found one and plugged it in. Third, call the power company and find out if this was widespread, or my own personal problem, which would tell me if I really HAD to do down into the basement. So I located the number, which took awhile because I couldn’t remember the power company’s name—it’s not the same as my former one. But I finally did, and phoned them, and learned that yes, this was a real outage, and I could expect my power back in about 4 hours.

Okay, four hours. I could deal with that. I had light. I couldn’t cook, but I wasn’t going to starve in four hours. And as for heat---ahh, yes. I have a fireplace. Heat, I have covered. And only the day before I had asked the former owner if there was anything that needed to be done, activated, cleaned, or opened before lighting a fire, and he said no, just go for it, so that’s what I did.

And the smoke came billowing into the living room. Uh-oh. Clearly there was some reason the smoke could not go up the chimney, and I had such a lovely fire going I couldn’t exactly stick my head up there to see why. I grabbed the poker, and, well, poked until I knocked against the issue, a damper which was closed. I poked it open, the smoke whooshed up the chimney, the fire took off, and all was well. Well, sort of. I still had to open all the windows to air the place out, which meant my fire ended up making me colder instead of warmer.

Now the entire incident, from the power going out to the fire burning merrily, took up the space of about 45 minutes. And no sooner had that time ticked past, than the power miraculously came back on. Not four hours at all, not that I’m complaining.

So yes, there have been a few bugs to work out, but no harm done, and I’m learning as I go. I’ve mastered the fireplace and the security system. I’m sure there will be other things for me to get a handle on as I go along, cooking on an electric stove being among them. But over all, Serenity (my name for my new home) and I are getting to know each other, and having fun doing it. The screw ups make us laugh. I swear this place has a personality. It’s playful, and warm and it loves me as much as I love it. So the snafus don’t stress me out or make me crazy. I just shake my head and giggle at myself, and move on to fix the problem. It’s an incredibly healthy new attitude.

I’ve been ordering furniture, a few pieces at a time, and will soon begin some decorating touches, starting with my bedroom, where I’m going to paint a green border on the walls, and accent them with autumn leaf patterns. I’ve already done window treatments in that room. It’s all coming together nicely, and gradually as I let the house tell me what’s going to work where and make it more and more a reflection of myself and an image of the inner energy of this place.

This morning, it snowed. Oh, there have been a few flakes mingled in with the rain once or twice over the past week or so, but this was the first real snow, that gave a sugar coating to the lawn and trees. I snapped a picture. As you can see, my gas grill is still on the back deck. I’ll get that stored away for the winter today.

Life is good here in Serenity. And it occurs to me that we can all create our own serenity, if we really want to. I highly recommend it. Serenity is a good place to be.

Maggie