Day 105 Beep Ring Ding

Friday 21 Nov 2008

I start the morning with heart pounding at 1:30 when Teri lurches out of bed and is all the way to the stairs before the loud beeps start; her ears are keen and she hears the four quiet beeps, precursor to the alarm going off—we must have missed an insect in our nightly sweep of enemy territory. I hear her talking to the Orus guy on the phone, doing a security check, hanging up, and resetting the alarm. We get two doses of beeps, quiet and loud.

I’m struggling to get back to sleep when Teri’s cell phone rings; she leaps out of bed and heads across the room to the chest of drawers. Our bedroom is strobe-lighted because her entire phone is blinking on and off in concert with the rings—she talks to the guy three different times before she’s able to convince him he has a wrong number. It’s 2:35 after the third dose of rings.

I get the rest of the story over desayuno. At 3:30 the dings start, the kind large trucks make when they back up; Teri thinks someone on the street is loading or unloading some large items in the middle of the night because she hears some scrapes, thumps and more dings, too many to count. I’m glad I sleep through the dings because the beeps and rings stole enough of my sleep; it’s Friday and I need to store some energy to replace what I’ll likely lose tomorrow morning in the wee hours from our weekly flood of musical merriment pouring from every house in the neighborhood but ours—or so it seems.