I ended up too anxious to allow our smoke alarm free status to continue.
Worrying about the worst case scenario is my standard modus operandi, so I definitely had visions of our house burning down and our insurance company refusing to pay out. “Look!” they would say to our grieving and impecunious offspring “Your mother stated quite clearly in this post of August nth, that they were going to remove all the smoke alarms, consequences be damned. It would hardly be fair to our shareholders to pay out under such circumstances…”
Luckily I had a better idea earlier this week: ear muffs. So, on Monday, I sought out an industrial protection shop. It turns out there’s one on my usual commute , but not for much longer: they’re moving out to the suburbs at the end of the month. It’s a shame because it’s a real Aladdin’s cave in there, all sorts of fun gear, like a hardware store on steroids. Anyway, they supplied me with the correctly rated ear muffs, one pair each for me and Simon. So, we’ll be putting the smoke alarms back up, and the next time we get a(n inevitable ) false alarm, we’ll be able to put our hearing protection on and take all the time we like to sort out the problem.
In the meantime, I’m very pleased to have finished my short course of steroids. It made no appreciable difference to my tinnitus but I was starting to feel rather disturbed and manic by the end. My thinking has now settled down, and the tinnitus, probably following the exact same natural history as if I hadn’t poisoned myself with supranormal levels of hormones, features now just the two arthropods calls: the nighttime chirping of crickets overlaying the summer sound of fields of cicadas droning in the sunshine. It remains jet engine loud, but it certainly could be worse.
