Fire Drill!!!

So, I got home from my trip to Albany late this afternoon, and decided today was a good day to catch up on TV and do laundry. Which are all in process.

Of course, I didn't intend on the fire drill.

My apartment is having another bout of random fire alarms. When I first moved in about 4 years ago they were pretty frequent, but since it was a brand-new building, it wasn't entirely unexpected. Since then, every once in a while, there'd be another one, due, in large part to the restaurants downstairs. And not too long ago, one of the restaurants even had an honest-to-goodness fire.

But this month, during the rare times that I've actually been at home, there have already been three fire alarms -- not even counting the one that only went off in my kitchen when I burned a bagel in the toaster. And, rumor has it that there have been more during daylight hours.

This, of course, is pissing me off. If the alarm wasn't so friggin' annoying, I'd probably just use it as an excuse to go to sleep early. But nooooooo, it's the loudest, most obnoxious ear-piercing shriek on earth.

Of course, when I'm being rational, I do realize that it's designed that way to motivate people like me to actually vacate the building rather than risk being burned to a crisp.

I have never in my life managed to live in a place that was not prone to random alarms. When I was in high school, there was a period of time when the burglar alarm would go off whenever anyone took a shower in the bathroom leading out to the pool. And I've already mentioned my last apartment in Gainesville, which, in addition to being in an apartment complex rumored to be where one of the murders took place, burned down several weeks after I moved out. The worst, of course, was when I lived on the 7th floor of the dorm at FSU. The alarm had a habit of going off at 3:30 in the morning, but only on days when I was hungover, had an early class (for me, that means any time before noon), or it was Antarctica cold (in Tallahassee, that means January).

FYI, Ted Bundy was rumored to have chased someone in this dorm before killing a couple of girls across the street at the Chi Omega house. What is with me living in places with serial killers? Why couldn't I live in the Jim Morrison dorm? But I digress.

Actually, now that I've ranted, I feel better. Now I can get back to laundry and catching up on TV, since I already heard that Jack Bauer saves the day, again.

And, as an aside about my previously mentioned trip to Albany -- on the airplane going out there yesterday, there were two buddhist monks. I actually sat next to them in the airport, in their saffron and ruby colored robes, and I kid you not, they were both eating Quarter Pounders with Cheese. Of course, I had always thought that Buddhists were vegetarians, but apparently, I was wrong. Oh well. You learn something new every day.