Security, my ass
Thunderstorms rolled through the northern edge of the Very Large Metropolitan Area last night, bringing with them a little bit of rain, a little bit of hail, a little bit of wind and a lot of lightning. This meant my son, who's afraid of nothing except storms, was downstairs in bed with us. Then came the inevitable power outage. Then, the screaming.

The Wife and our then-insurance agent talked me into buying a "security system" when we moved to Texas. Everybody up here in Plastic White Suburbia has one. I've always been opposed to such a thing; in the event of a break-in, all it would do is further scare the crap out of you. Last summer in our little suburb, a homeowner was shot to death by a police officer responding to the homeowner's burglar alarm in a very sad accident. My solution would be simply to pay to have the little sign out in my front yard. That would stop the amateurs, at least.

The main function of our security system is to sound its high-pitched wail whenever there's a power outage. The battery backup in the system apparently isn't working properly, and we don't use the damn thing enough to think to fix it until it starts wailing when the power goes out, as it did about 3 a.m. today. This was two hours into the power outage, and we already were starting to become uncomfortable from the lack of air conditioning.

A quick call to the equally sleepy technical support guy achieved nothing. "Turn off the power," he said. The f---ing power is already out, you idiot. "Oh." Basically, I opened the thing up and beat it with a screwdriver until it stopped screaming. I think I broke it. I don't really care. (Can you tell I got 37 minutes of sleep last night?)

While all this was going on, both of my daughters slept placidly upstairs -- the 7-year old and the 18-month-old. I can count my blessings.

The Old Daughter was rousted at her usual 6:45 a.m. She looked out the window and said, "Hmm. Looks like it rained a little bit last night."