June 27, 2007--A strange noise

Yesterday the pastor's newly adopted children came over for a visit. They've got a girl babysitting for them this week because the pastor's wife is trying to clean out all the closets and organize everything, and the kids tend to undo things faster than she can do them. So they've hired her to help keep the kids occupied so she can actually accomplish some things. She brought them all out to my house for a couple of hours, and they had fun chasing the chickens around. One girl especially loved the baby chicks and wanted to take one home so bad. When she left, she had to kiss them all goodbye. We took a walk around town, stopped by to visit another church member, (there are five families in our small town that attend our church) and stopped down at my mom and dad's to play on their swingset. The kids had a lot of fun and the children didn't get into any trouble or fight or have any major rebellious moments, so it was an enjoyable experience for everyone. After they left, I kept hearing this beeping sound. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. It wasn't steady--sometimes the beeps would be close together and sometimes further apart. Sometimes they would stop and then start. I finally figured out it was coming from the basement. It sounded like an alarm of some kind. I wondered if there was a radon gas detector or something that I didn't know about down there, and I called my dad to come down and help see what it was. He came down and looked and listened. It sounded to me like it was coming from the ceiling, but the sound was echoing off the basement walls and could have been coming from anywhere. He leaned over the piled of boxes of Erick's tools to check out the well pump, and the sound became more muffled. He said he thought it was coming from the boxes. I looked through--and there was a smoke alarm. Sure enough, it started beeping, and that was the sound we were looking for. It was beeping because the batteries were low. I was glad it was only that, but I did feel a bit silly having to have my dad come over to find a smoke alarm with low batteries.