(Please forgive me if I use that phrase as a post title repeatedly.  It's especially for Joey.)

We had a mostly lovely, but rather odd weekend in Boston.  We ate barbecue and seafood, which are two things Boston does better than Toronto (yes, even Boston has better bbq than Toronto, which is scary considering what Southerners think of Boston's).  We spent time with friends.  We went to Filene's Basement.  Lots of can't-get-it-here fixes.

But there's never a dull moment, not even at 7 on a Sunday morning at my parents' place in suburbia.

I was sort of awake anyway, hoping to go back to sleep for an hour before getting ready for dim sum.  There were these two high-pitched pings, which I figured were the sounds of a smoke detector losing its battery.

Then the burglar alarm went off.

I went out to the hall to figure out what was going on.  My dad, whose steps are easy to distinguish from my mom's (Joey was still in bed), was running around, and it was just a little too weird for all that to be going on for no reason.

Turns out the carbon monoxide detector was what was chirping.  The other alarm had gone off because my dad, without focusing on turning it off, had started opening windows.

"Put on clothes!  Open more windows, I'm calling the fire department!"

After a few minutes, when I happened to be peeing in preparation for evacuation - hey, one type of evacuation requires another when you've just woken up -

"Shut the windows!  let's get out of here!"

Turns out you are not supposed to open windows - you are just supposed to leave.  If you open the windows, the fire department cannot test the CO levels.

So we went outside.  A cop showed up first.  He was just there to make sure the humans were in decent shape, he couldn't do anything with the house.  So we chatted about some of his retired colleagues who are dads or step-dads of my high school friends.

Then the fire truck came.  In our town, the firefighters are mainly volunteer.  This means we woke them all up.  And it turns out there'd been a house fire overnight in town, so they were exhausted.  But they were all very "professional" and pleasant.  Nice guys.

The reading on the thing had been something like 223 parts per million.  If it had been accurate, probably the first person to have read it would have been the cop...after we'd been reported missing.

The battery had died.

Oopsie.