adrenaline

My fight-or-flight response is in tip-top working order. How do I know this? Our smoke detectors went off at 4:30 this morning. They only went off for about five seconds... and that's all it took. With lightening speed I went from a sound sleep to running in about a second. No exaggeration. I really wish I had just a little bit of that oomph when the alarm clock rings. Apparently the decibel level is woefully inadequate. I need earsplitting to really get moving.

Before we even started looking for the source, the alarm had stopped. After checking EVERYWHERE and finding no signs of smoke or fire, we went back to bed, thinking maybe the fan had created the problem and we "solved" it by turning off the fan. Back to bed, trying to relax and get my heart rate back to normal. Ten minutes later, it happened again. Whoosh! Back out of bed. After that, I held out little hope of sleeping. Of course, it was 5:00 am by the time the second investigation happened.

After finding nothing, we turned off the circuit breaker, although I wasn't entirely comfortable with that, I was even less comfortable hearing that noise again with no evidence of flame or smoke. False alarm. Over and over again. Our smoke detector was the alarm that cried "wolf".  Ugh.  SO... I spent the next hour lying in bed considering what I would do if there was a real fire to which we weren't going to be alerted. Would the kids freak out or follow our fire escape plan calmly? Would the dog hide? What would I save? Would I remember to wear shoes? Should I change now so I'm not forced to live in my pjs? Cute as they may be, I don't want to be seen on the evening news wearing them. Needless to say, this line of thinking is not conducive to sleep. 5:00 am is also not conducive to waking, except in very rare circumstances involving seeing sunrise... on purpose. It was a tough position.

Did I mention it was the night before the first day of school? Alarms set to ring at 6:00. Yeah, the ENTIRE summer, we slept in (whether that was a mistake in itself is debatable.) 4:30 was indeed the middle of the night, or at least the middle of our sleeping hours. But no, the first day that 4:30 is dangerously close to wake-up time, we're up. REALLY up. Not enough time to fall back to sleep, only enough to ensure you'll probably sleep through your alarm. Yeah, someone up there has a sense of humor.

perspective

I was just pondering perspective shift.  It's some crazy hindsight phenomena: looking back things were often better than you thought at the time.  Well, except for hair and fashion.  Those were always way worse than you thought.  Mullets and legwarmers and suspenders, oh my! But seriously, I can't think of any picture from my younger years when I've looked back and didn't think, "Man, I wish I was that skinny again" or something to that effect.  At the time the picture was taken, of course, I was whining about how I really have to lose weight.   The same is true of so many things.  I complained about being tired for years, then had kids. I obviously had no idea what tired meant.  When I was single I complained that I was busy. Yeah, I had no idea where the "busy" scale started, or that I was really barely on the scale. I shot up quickly. 

It's a generalization, I know. Some people have lost lots of weight and look back with satisfaction at their "before" pictures. I know I'm in better shape now than I was years ago (although disappointingly still not much thinner...I don't get that.) My independent kids are now taking care of themselves more which means I'm less busy. Life improves for many in many ways. I'm not saying it all just keeps going downhill (that would be depressing, and I'm not going to drag us down),  but you get what I'm saying.

Back in March I wrote a post about needing a geek, because I had started a blog and was technically challenged.  Since then I've started a business. I had no idea what technically challenged even meant, apparently. Okay, NOW I'm technically challenged.  That was just a practice run. Now I'm dealing with a website and blog and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and...oh my, indeed. Meta-tags? Inbound links? SEO? Are you kidding me? I had no idea.  I thought I wanted a geek then.  Who knew?