No More Beeps

The smoke alarms stayed quiet for the rest of the night. I lost an hour sleep but that’s worth it for not having the house burn down. We briefly had a theory for what happened (other than it needed a battery swap). I put the dishwasher on before we went to bed and it looks like something small and plastic fell off the rack and landed close to the heat coil. That seemed likely until we did the math. The dishwasher would have been finished a few hours before the alarm went off. Oh well.

Fear the Walking Dead wasn’t terrible last night. It wasn’t good, but it was fair. Other than the laughably stupid light house thing where they decided light houses point straight down, of course. My beef is the same beef that I’ve beefed since Scott Gimple took over as show runner on the main show in season four. Last night was the season premier and we saw exactly one main cast member. One. The season is 16 episodes and the cast is lucky (I should put that word in quotes) if they work in half of them. This one had a character I was interested in, a little at least, but there will be entire episodes that don’t have a single character worth watching. It’s the Gimple way. World Beyond was fair at best too. We’re three episodes into the final season and we basically spent the whole hour introducing new people. Maybe when we look back on the whole thing we’ll realize we learned something important this week, but it sure just feels like prep work right now. Uh. Why do I care?

Red Sox/Astros ALCS game three is tonight at Fenway. Eduardo Rodriguez goes for the Red Sox. We need a big game from everyone tonight. We took the home field advantage away from them with the game two win, we need to hold it. The fewer trips to Houston we have to make, the better. Are you feeling the hype? I am.

Okay, folks. Time to go to work. Have a good one.

Hello Stress

As mentioned in the previous post, as well as a couple from last week, we are trying Hello Fresh again. Are you familiar with it? Every week they send us recipes and all of the ingredients for a couple of meals. All we have to do is follow the instructions and boom, fancy dinner for two. It’s kind of like culinary paint by numbers.

Except it tends to be really stressful. We’ve tried it in the past, as well as their main competitor Blue Apron, and generally trying to get all of the prep for each step done in time would raise our blood pressure by about 10000%. This time we’re taking it easier. If step one is prep, step two is cook, and step three is “while that’s cooking, prep again” we just do the two prep steps first. It takes longer to finish, but it’s easier on the heart.

Mostly.

There is also the little issue with the smoke alarms. I think in the last six meals we’ve done, we’ve set off the smoke alarms in the house four times. Four. Times. It’s gotten to the point where I turn on the exhaust fan and open all of the windows before I do anything else. It didn’t help tonight though. Frying up the chicken cutlets in the pan on the stove sure enough set those bastard alarms off once again. At least we know they work, right?

Speaking of the frying pan, the oil the chicken fried in splashed all over the kitchen. I’ve mopped the floor three times in the last two hours. Hopefully we don’t slip and fall. I would feel like a right asshole if that happened.

Still, despite all of that… the dinners we’ve made have been really good. Jen was a little down on one, but the rest have gone over really well.

Here’s hoping the trend continues. I think Jen is happy to not be eating chicken breasts and quinoa every night. Whatever makes my love happy.

Double Whammy

This morning one of our smoke detectors gave us the “please change my battery, you friggin’ savage” alarm. I went through the maze of alarm locations in the house trying to figure out which one was yelling at us. I found it in the mud room. They are kinda a pain to take off the ceiling but I got it down. They are kinda a pain to open up but I got it open. They are kinda a pain to pop out the batteries but I got them out. They are kinda a pain to re-hang on the ceiling but I got it back up.

I made the mistake of pressing the test button. When you do that it doesn’t just test the one you’re holding in your hand, it tests every single alarm in the house. The noise is overwhelming, which is good when there’s a fire but really painful when you just woke up.

None of this is the actual story though.

When the shockingly loud, house-wide test was complete and the smoke detector was hung on the ceiling again……….

…………the smoke detector in Harry’s room started giving the “please change my battery, you friggin’ savage” alarm.

Muthapussbucket