Just As We Suspected

Our smoke detector started going off on short random bursts the night before last. I figured the battery might be low so I retrieved a ladder from the lanai room and attempted to change it.

Attempted, I say, because the ladder was only eight feet tall and the alarm is set a good 14 feet up in the cathedral-ceilinged living room, right next to the air conditioning vent and just outside my brother's bedroom door. I'm not really happy with heights as it is and, standing on the top rung, I could barely reach the plastic disc only to find that it is not battery operated at all but attached firmly to the wall by the electrical wires that power it. I found this out by twisting the disc in a manner that would unscrew a normal battery powered model but succeeded only in wrenching it from the wall to hang dangling.

My brother came home to find the vandalized alarm hanging in a most accusatory manner, the ladder in the living room and cats resting on the lower rungs. I had thought that he, being taller than I, would want to fix the thing since the alarm was still going off on a random, if less frequent, basis but he said he had a larger ladder outside and would take care of it in the morning so I shook the cats off the rungs and dragged it back out onto the lanai.

When I came home last night, he had pulled the thing completely off the wall which means we have no smoke detector now although that doesn't bother me all that much since the only times it has ever gone off, other than this instance, is when my brother burns his supper which we already know because of the smell. (It didn't go off the night Mom draped a nylon top over her quartz heater. I woke to the smell of burning plastic, went into Mom's room, and managed to unplug the heater and pull the melting shirt off it before anything actually caught fire. Mom, who otherwise would have slept through the whole thing, was duly embarrassed and promised never to do anything like that again which, to her credit and despite the increasing dementia, she never did.)

My brother had, by then, moved the bigger, 15 foot tall ladder into his room so he could clean his ceiling fan but, before he could start, the cats found it. Mittens climbed all the way to the very top. And was obviously stuck there. The look on her face said there was no possibility of her
ever climbing down that steep slope (and this is the cat that climbs screen doors all the way to the top and back down again). Paribanour started up after her, very slowly, and only got about two thirds of the way up before she, too, froze. My brother climbed up to retrieve them but they maintained death grips on the rungs. He almost lost his balance pulling Paribanour off. He couldn't climb back down holding the cats and had to toss each one down to me as he pried them loose.

They're now banned from his room until he's done cleaning and the ladder goes back outdoors. Because they will not learn from experience. Mittens was so desperate to take a second crack at the ladder, she spent ten minutes clawing at his door to get back in.

So, yeah, after last night, I don't see a Christmas tree going up any time soon.