Wake Up! I'm Back

by Cathy

The second morning I returned from my trip, my inner clock jarred me awake. It was still dark out so it wasn't time to get up just yet. Was it?

'Come on,' I grumbled to myself as I tossed and turned in place. I knew that I was up because of the time zone difference between Aruba and Chicago. And on top of that, we had the daylight savings hour to contend with so now I was TWO hours off.
What time was it anyway?

I turned to look at my alarm clock and was greeted by 3:45 blinkety-blinking at me.
"What the...?"
I nudged Joe. "We had a power outage in the middle of the night."
"What?" Joe snorted awake. "What happened? What time is it?"
"Hold on, let me check my phone." Luckily it was still on and sitting on my nightstand.
"6:15? Wow, I thought it was much earlier. Glad I woke up or we would have overslept!"

So then we tried to sleep that limbo sleep where you want to get some more rest but you can't let yourself fully sleep lest you sleep too long - after all, it was rather close to our 7am wake up call - but no use. Our minds and bladders were reeling. I got up to go to the bathroom and in passing our alarm system, I heard BEEP. I hadn't heard it until then, but that doesn't mean it hadn't been going off since the power outage. I padded into the bathroom and 30 seconds later, BEEP. How long was this going on?

I grumbled at the third BEEP in two minutes. So I walked over to the alarm keypad and with one eye still shut, I started pressing buttons. In no particular order, in no code formation. Just kept pressing them but to no avail. I began using both hands now and in the process, I inadvertently hit the two buttons retained for Panic Mode.

No, no need to panic. It's just me, half asleep, pressing alarm keypads at the ass-crack of dawn.

Before I knew it, sirens were blaring and lights were flashing. The girls were out of bed and dragging into the hallway half in fear of their lives and half wanting to go back to bed. Joe was out of bed asking what was going on and shooing the girls back to bed while I was "this close" to pulling the alarm keypad out of the wall to make it stop. Thoughts of my condo neighbors running to my front door in their night clothes, bedhead hair and bad breath were running through my head as I frantically, now fully WIDE awake, tried to make the sirens stop. Please, please, please don't let the police show up! I was fully expecting my house phone to start ringing off the hook.


Then, it hit me.The fuse box!!! I opened the furnace room and clicked every fuse down the panel until I found the one connected to the alarm box. Thankfully, it stopped. And thankfully? No police, no neighbors and no phone calls.

"Well, I guess we're officially up now!" Joe said.
"My God, a few minutes ago we were sound asleep! But thank goodness I got up because we would've totally overslept today."
"Yup, you made sure THAT didn't happen," he replied.
Ahhhhh....good to be home again.