Having been through a near fatal propane tank expulsion on Sunday at the Patriots game everyone around me is now more conscious of fire safety. Jeremy sent me this email

"Hey i just noticed we dont have a single smoke detector in the apartment, we really need 4 simple 9-volt stick up ones to be safe, if you are at home depot anytime soon or a hardware store pick some up."

So I figured I'd grabe four of these: First Alert FG888D 9V Smoke Detector.

That reminds me why I don't have any smoke detectors in the apartment. We used to have one of them and I can remember how and why it was expelled from Eden. It was about midnight on a fall night in Brookline when the smoke detector started to chirp every two minutes. It had been chirping once an hour which was easy enough to ignore but at once every five minutes something had to be done. I believe it was trying to inform us that the battery was beginning to run low. Being a good and handy repair person I took the detector down from the ceiling and took a 9 volt battery out of the drawer and prepared to repair the detector.

To my surprise removing the battery had the unexpected result of causing it to beep continuously with what can only be described as a the sound you would put into a sonic weapon that you would use to cause an eardrum to bleed. The smoke detector had some type of anti-tampering device in it to keep evil arson minded individuals from removing the batteries from the device. So I rushed to place the 9 volt battery into the smoke detector believing that placing a charged battery into the device would end the evil piercing sound that was rapidly turning my entire body to jelly and most likely causing my neighbors upstairs and below to deploy their rope ladders to climb down out of the burning deathtrap of a Brookline condominium.

Placing the new battery into the device had no effect whatsoever. It continued to beep. I have the most annoying neighbor in the world who hates me for a variety of reasons but I began to think how this fiasco with the midnight smoke detector alarm would drive her nuts so I took the battery out again figuring it would run out of power sooner or later. But after a minute it still didn't run out of power. So I tried smashing it with my boots on to crush the mechanism into submission.

Stephanie, who was with me that evening, was also freaking out about the loud noise and the neighbors and she finally told me that the only thing we could do would be to take it outside and put it into a place where nobody would hear it until it stopped making the noise. I volunteered her for this task since I was more of a hunter trying to kill the thing and she could be more agricultural in burying it. Stephanie took the remains of the tattered smoke alarm and brought them outside.

When she returned she told me what she had done with it. She hadn't found any good enclosed place to put it until she came across the blue mailbox on the corner. Since it had an enclosed area she slid it into the slot and closed the door on it making a bizarre present or prank for the postman to find. It apparently wasn't any quieter in the mailbox as it acted like an amplifying drum to inform the whole neighborhood that there was something beeping inside of it.

I still imagine the police in bomb control outfits wandering the streets of Brookline trying to figure out what sort of explosive device was left in the mailbox and tracing the broken smoke detector back to me using fingerprints and boot footprint analysis.

Now I need to trust the US Postal service to not be too revenge minded when they deliver the 4 new smoke detectors that I just ordered to my Brookline apartment.