He’s reading a dirty magazine written in invisible ink?
He feels it’s safe so long as he hears bathroom noises?
When the dryer is running, he knows where Janis is. When the sound stops, she might pop up anywhere, at any time, whether he’s ready or not.
Fortunately, he doesn’t really hide anything from her, so it’s just a mental note, and not a real need to be aware of her location.
When he can hear the hair dryer, he can relax with his coffee and mag in a reverie with distant white noise. When it goes off and silence ensues, the time is soon coming when he might be required to do something or just be chatted to – neither bad things in themselves, but different from your own private headspace.
Obligatory old joke: A guy lives next to a lighthouse on a perpetually foggy shore. They fire off a cannon every hour. The guy eventually reaches the point where he can sleep through it.
One night, the cannon is late. The guy jumps out of bed yelling “What was THAT?”
I didn’t on my own catch that it was more like magazine size than a folio newspaper. But still it doesn’t strike me as a guilty reaction or something to cover up, just a note to emerge from being off in his own world and standing ready to interact.
“Very bad when drums stop.”
narmitaj saved me a lot of typing. Got it exactly, IMHO.
MinorAnnoyance, I’d find that joke a lot funnier if a few years ago there hadn’t been a dog across the street who woke me up with his barking every single morning at 5:30. I learned to semi-ignore it, until one morning I woke up at 5:30 wondering why the dog hadn’t barked.
CIDU Bill – Sherlock Holmes turned a story on a dog not barking, and Mark Haddon made a novel of it… Why did the dog in your street not bark… did you investigate?? Or did you turn over and go to sleep and leave the victim to bleed to death?
narmitaj, this is somebody who allowed his dog to bark at 5:30 every morning; what do you think?
I know that if I am writing to someone complaining about Robert – yeah, I do that – we are together almost all the time – I get it finished or switch,like a teenager looking at something he should not when I hear him coming down the stairs – which he did in the middle of this post, believe it or not – but this font is too small for him to read a distance and he is distracted spraying the house with Lysol as we – I – had a “cooking incident” that filled the house with smoke – and the @#!! smoke detector would not shut off for close to an hour.
The inventor of the smoke detector probably saved a LOT of lives. But, whoever decided to put products into houses that didn’t have a way to silence them for a false alarm set back the cause considerably. Sometimes I go into a house and I can see where the smoke detectors used to be.
I don’t know how it works in normal houses but in our house, once one alarm goes off, the nearest alarm soon follows and before long it spreads to every alarm in the house, like barking dogs.
We got home from our Chicago trip in May to find every alarm in the house screaming (traditionally when we come home from trips the only mystery is whether we’ll find a minor disaster or a major disaster; this time, we noticed the minor disaster right away while the major disaster remained hidden for a few days). I ran through the house disconnecting smoke alarm after smoke alarm, and then waiting until I’d found the one that had started the racket.
And as James pointed out, some of them are still sitting on a table in the living room because I had to disconnect them with extreme prejudice.
“I don’t know how it works in normal houses but in our house, once one alarm goes off, the nearest alarm soon follows and before long it spreads to every alarm in the house, like barking dogs.”
You actually want this behavior.
What you don’t want is the case where the fire that started in the basement, sets off the basement smoke detector, while the smoke detectors upstairs on the second floors (by all the bedrooms) stay nice and quiet so you can sleep soundly.
I’ve never experienced the chain reaction that Bill cited, but I think I must agree with James here. That said, I think that if I had the chain-reaction system, I would change batteries annually instead of whenever one tells me it is dying.
Re smoke alarms: Has nobody ever heard the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?
Our alarms are not related and only one was going off – it did so for an hour and a half – with no actual fire. I dealt with it standing on a chair on my toes for half an hour before I could even let Robert know, then he came down an dealt with it going off for the last hour.
It is one of the new 10 year battery, never change the battery units. It did not just unscrew by hand from the ceiling and we were not of a mind to get the directions. We also were not sure about taking the battery out. We have since replaced it with one that unscrews from the ceiling by turning the unit itself and one can pull the battery out of it in a situation like this.
The “chain reaction” is built into sprinkler systems on purpose. If it gets hot enough to cause the little glass bulb on one sprinkler to shatter, the sudden release of water pressure by that sprinkler will shatter the bulbs on all the sprinkler heads connected to the same system of pipes.
Comics I Don't Understand 
He’s reading a dirty magazine written in invisible ink?
He feels it’s safe so long as he hears bathroom noises?
When the dryer is running, he knows where Janis is. When the sound stops, she might pop up anywhere, at any time, whether he’s ready or not.
Fortunately, he doesn’t really hide anything from her, so it’s just a mental note, and not a real need to be aware of her location.
When he can hear the hair dryer, he can relax with his coffee and mag in a reverie with distant white noise. When it goes off and silence ensues, the time is soon coming when he might be required to do something or just be chatted to – neither bad things in themselves, but different from your own private headspace.
Obligatory old joke: A guy lives next to a lighthouse on a perpetually foggy shore. They fire off a cannon every hour. The guy eventually reaches the point where he can sleep through it.
One night, the cannon is late. The guy jumps out of bed yelling “What was THAT?”
I didn’t on my own catch that it was more like magazine size than a folio newspaper. But still it doesn’t strike me as a guilty reaction or something to cover up, just a note to emerge from being off in his own world and standing ready to interact.
“Very bad when drums stop.”
narmitaj saved me a lot of typing. Got it exactly, IMHO.
MinorAnnoyance, I’d find that joke a lot funnier if a few years ago there hadn’t been a dog across the street who woke me up with his barking every single morning at 5:30. I learned to semi-ignore it, until one morning I woke up at 5:30 wondering why the dog hadn’t barked.
CIDU Bill – Sherlock Holmes turned a story on a dog not barking, and Mark Haddon made a novel of it… Why did the dog in your street not bark… did you investigate?? Or did you turn over and go to sleep and leave the victim to bleed to death?
narmitaj, this is somebody who allowed his dog to bark at 5:30 every morning; what do you think?
I know that if I am writing to someone complaining about Robert – yeah, I do that – we are together almost all the time – I get it finished or switch,like a teenager looking at something he should not when I hear him coming down the stairs – which he did in the middle of this post, believe it or not – but this font is too small for him to read a distance and he is distracted spraying the house with Lysol as we – I – had a “cooking incident” that filled the house with smoke – and the @#!! smoke detector would not shut off for close to an hour.
The inventor of the smoke detector probably saved a LOT of lives. But, whoever decided to put products into houses that didn’t have a way to silence them for a false alarm set back the cause considerably. Sometimes I go into a house and I can see where the smoke detectors used to be.
I don’t know how it works in normal houses but in our house, once one alarm goes off, the nearest alarm soon follows and before long it spreads to every alarm in the house, like barking dogs.
We got home from our Chicago trip in May to find every alarm in the house screaming (traditionally when we come home from trips the only mystery is whether we’ll find a minor disaster or a major disaster; this time, we noticed the minor disaster right away while the major disaster remained hidden for a few days). I ran through the house disconnecting smoke alarm after smoke alarm, and then waiting until I’d found the one that had started the racket.
And as James pointed out, some of them are still sitting on a table in the living room because I had to disconnect them with extreme prejudice.
“I don’t know how it works in normal houses but in our house, once one alarm goes off, the nearest alarm soon follows and before long it spreads to every alarm in the house, like barking dogs.”
You actually want this behavior.
What you don’t want is the case where the fire that started in the basement, sets off the basement smoke detector, while the smoke detectors upstairs on the second floors (by all the bedrooms) stay nice and quiet so you can sleep soundly.
I’ve never experienced the chain reaction that Bill cited, but I think I must agree with James here. That said, I think that if I had the chain-reaction system, I would change batteries annually instead of whenever one tells me it is dying.
Re smoke alarms: Has nobody ever heard the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?
Our alarms are not related and only one was going off – it did so for an hour and a half – with no actual fire. I dealt with it standing on a chair on my toes for half an hour before I could even let Robert know, then he came down an dealt with it going off for the last hour.
It is one of the new 10 year battery, never change the battery units. It did not just unscrew by hand from the ceiling and we were not of a mind to get the directions. We also were not sure about taking the battery out. We have since replaced it with one that unscrews from the ceiling by turning the unit itself and one can pull the battery out of it in a situation like this.
The “chain reaction” is built into sprinkler systems on purpose. If it gets hot enough to cause the little glass bulb on one sprinkler to shatter, the sudden release of water pressure by that sprinkler will shatter the bulbs on all the sprinkler heads connected to the same system of pipes.