Here it is, just a few days in to the new year, and I’ve already got new ideas for stories and poems. It’s funny how one or two incidents can snowball into lots of possibilities.

My friend, Kathy H., is partially responsible.

If you follow me on facebook, you may remember a few days ago I was pulling my hair out because of a beeping sound in my house. Bear with me while I tell those who didn’t catch the action.

I had dismantled all the smoke alarms and unplugged all the little accessorial devices I had, to the point where I only had the major appliances still running, and the *** noise was still there. It was intermittent and continued for several days.  My cats were going bonkers.

At times it seemed to be coming from in between the walls or in the ceiling or crawlspace.  Arghhh! I narrowed it down to the ‘junk’ room (do we all have one of those?) and decided I needed to go through all those boxes, one by one, until I located it.

Luckily it was in one of the first couple I went through.  Yes, a new smoke alarm that I had put the battery into, but never installed above a door.  Arghhh again!

Bo said it would have been handy if the box had caught fire.  Pthhhht!

Anyway, my writer-mind had been on hold while I dealt with all the frustration.

Then Kathy said, “Good fodder for a scary book scene”.

Yikes!  Of course!

What if….I searched all my life until it literally drove me batty?/….in the course of the search, I discovered(what)?/…it turned out to be something sinister and not a simple dead battery?

You see what’s happening here?  There’s already at least three stories there, waiting to be developed.

Thanks, Kathy – I think.  Now I’ll have something to work on when the ice storms hit in a few weeks, if I haven’t worked them out already.  If I have, I’m sure there will be something else there to start on, inspired by the next mini-crisis in my life.

I’m learning to heed my friends’ replies. You never know what lurks behind an innocent beep.

Oh yeah.  Now I have to buy a whole bunch of new batteries.  You see, I dumped them as I uninstalled them (right – not eco-friendly at all), thinking that each one was the culprit. So now I need to reload AND INSTALL all those smoke detectors again.

Surely there’s a story in that…someplace.

Happy Birthday, Taylor.  22 years.  Grandson definitely not a kid any more