T.G.I...fuck

On the cusp of a migraine, this morning I woke up to the sounds of my musically inclined neighbor. She plays the harp and her name is something that sounds like a name you know but is not. She was not playing the harp. From her apartment was some kind of wind instrument. I like strings of pretty much any variety. I fucking hate wind instruments. Some more so than others, but pretty much the entire set is bothersome to me.

And what was being played on this wind instrument?

It was christmas music.

Continuing to sleep was out of the question, but a little dead kennedys on the ipod at least took the edge off being awake. This is not how I wanted to wake up. I had already realized 10 minutes before that (a) we had no coffee left (b) I couldn't go get any because my car was in the shop and A____'s is a stick and (c) Neither one of us had any cash left on us so even if I did wake A_____ and ask him to go get coffee, the mission had just become more complicated than the drive through down the street.

Flutey christmas music was like salt for my wound.

And I am noticing this is starting to look unpleasantly like a pattern. Oh say it isn't so....

Last Friday, it was the carbon monoxide detector. While I am glad it works and got me out of bed, several things surprised me about it. One was how easily I could have stayed in bed.
The other is how hard it is to do what you know is right (e.g. call 911, pack up your cat, sit on the porch with laptop and kitty and no coffee) when there is no immediate sensable evidence that you should.

See, it turns out there was a good reason for the CO detector to be going off last week, and that would be the presence of CO. It seems the unseasonably warm weather shut off our oil burner, which, when it restarts, causes a build up of gas. At least this is how the landlord explained it a day later when he called back - that it happened once before when the weather was warm (hey don't bother telling anyone, I mean it's just the carbon monoxide alarm and all). Landlord fixed it later last Friday by coming over and opening the windows to air out the basement.

Good. Meanwhile, I guess most of the night at least, it was wafting up....up into the spaces around the furnace, spaces like my apartment and the hallway where the CO detector was.

I'm not saying I narrowly escaped death. I don't think there was that much gas. I think though that I might have escaped a rotten sick head feeling for the rest of the day. And I think I had my ability to actually respond to an alarm tested. I discovered that when there is JUST an alarm going off, when it doesn't say what it is (see this isn't the old school bat cave, not EVERYTHING has a label on it), when you have people standing around saying "oh my I wonder what that is?", when one of those people is a man who talks like he's taking charge and going to deduce what is causing this based on whatever, his fucking Y chromosome and male pattern baldness (not loving guys this week), it's really HARD to go into your apartment, pack up your kitty, and call 911. Maybe it's years of conditioning based on meaningless latenight false fire alarms in my dorm as a younger woman, but I discovered there was almost a physical force to overcome to take the alarm seriously.

So that's my Friday so far, this one and the one before. This one has resolved...the dead kennedys/pixies shuffle seems to have done the trick.

I really gotta get me an mp3 player of some sort if I'm going to get through the holidays (wait, I mean the birth of jesus christ. Related - do you think these (self) righteous media sluts will start a campaign to boycott people who don't say "god bless you" when someone sneezes?).