So that was a helluva eight months. Like everyone, I’m a little furrier, and just a touch more stressed.

But

I finally did it, I enrolled in a writing course. Well writing courses. But I’m a grown up. With children. And a job. So that means I complete them one at a time. Because that’s how you eat elephants- one at a time.

That’s definitely the saying.

So in lieu of actual posts, I’m going to post my assignments. Please enjoy them. Or not. But please grade them. And rip into them like you are my mother and my work is an errant, shrieking smoke alarm.

Introduction to Storytelling – Keep a journal

September 16, 2020

The battery in the smoke detector outside my bedroom died at precisely three forty-one am this morning. I wonder whether they program it that way, whether it’s China’s revenge on us for forcing them to produce all our goods.

 I can picture it -the two unfortunate workers sitting next to each other in the factory.

“Should I set it for two fifteen?”

“No, they’ll get a good night’s sleep after that, pick a later time.”

It made me remember when I was little and the smoke detector went off in the night. Instead of a sporadic beep, it was a long wail that pierced your eardrums and was so loud that you felt you could almost see sound.

 I walked out of my bedroom just in time to see my mother whacking the plastic safety device repeatedly with a broom. The smoke detector flew across the landing and onto the floor where my mother pounced on the battery compartment with the aggression of a hungry lion tearing into a gazelle, snuffing out the smoke detector’s life force as swiftly as a predator on the Discovery Channel.

I wish I had been that dramatic when my smoke detector went off. It makes for better childhood memories.

I merely reached up and removed it from its place on the ceiling. I didn’t even need a chair- a benefit of living in a house that was designed for oversized garden gnomes. Then I grabbed the kitchen step stool to reach the shelf with the batteries.

There were no nine volt batteries. Are there ever any nine volt batteries at three in the morning? Perhaps all the charged nine volt batteries gather together to party at that hour, licking one another for kicks. Who knows?

So then I had to make the decision of which smoke detector to move from its floor to replace the defunct one outside the bedrooms. Which begs the question- if I were a fire, where would I start?

The answer is of course – pants, hence the phrase ‘liar, liar pants on fire’. Ergo I swapped out the main floor one because there were pants in the basement hanging on the clothes horse to dry. Then I went and lay awake in bed for three hours and thought about how my children will only have boring stories to tell.