What a night!

I got to the apartment yesterday around 3, just in time for the snow to begin. It was light, but still.... Yesterday was the beginning of Spring.

I went to bed about ten, the way I usually do. Shortly after settling in, I began to hear an annoying irregular buzzy beeping, sort of like the "voice" of Star Wars character R2D2. It occurred irregularly, sometimes every hour, sometimes more often. Just as I thought I'd figured out what it was, it was back. I turned off everything on the side of the room that it seemed to be coming from. I unplugged everything. I even took the batteries out of the carbon monoxide detector. (They needed changing anyway.)

Each time I turned something else off, I'd feel sure that I'd solved the problem, so I'd snuggle back into bed, and just as I was about to relax enough to go to sleep, it would happen again. I was starting to wonder whether I needed a tinfoil hat like people who think that the voices are telling them what to do!

About four a.m. or so, suddenly my cell phone beeped to let me know I had a text message. It was the tv station texting me that my area was under a storm watch--for a storm that will be moving in on TUESDAY. That was a warning that could have waited until daylight! So I was once again bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and this time, I seemed to hear the buzzing-beeping from the other side of the room. It was the sound machine, which makes sense since I always turn it on right as I get ready for bed. I don't know if it has gone bad, or what. So I turned off the sound machine, and then of course, I could hear every squeak, every car on the highway, every step elsewhere in the building (including the clanging up and down the iron staircase outside my window). Still, I drifted off to sleep for a few minutes, only to be awakened by the beeping that told me the power was out in the apartment. It turns out that this side of Big Rapids had lost power, but that was the last straw.

I got up, realized I could not eat breakfast or even make coffee because the gas stove has an electronic pilot light. I could not even shower. So I pulled on my clothes, brushed my bed-head hair, and went to the office, where (of course) there was no power outage. I tended to the needs of a couple of my pre-pharm advisees, and then I canceled classes and returned back to the apartment, where the power had been restored. In a minute, I'm going to try to sleep. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the flavor of a cup of coffee. I've eaten breakfast, too. But my brain is a foggy lowland, so I can't imagine what I would have said to students during conferences.

Meanwhile, back to the storm watch for our county: Spring might have sprung, but someone forgot to tell Mother Nature. The prediction is for heavy snow, freezing rain, sleet, ice--all the glories of winter. It's supposed to begin on Tuesday afternoon and make life generally miserable through Wednesday. Groan.