A Rude Awakening

One of the things you have to put up with, living in Queensland or the sub-tropics, you share your house with geckos. Mostly they live outside and come out at night onto windows, fly screens and doors for their nightly feed. Sometimes, one or two of them find their way into the house. They are harmless and frightened little creatures and usually keep out of the way.

Since we have a monitored alarm system, we usually set the alarm at night to cover the garage and my office downstairs. (My cave, the Blogger calls it). Since I've retired and no longer run a business down there, there really is no need for it to be alarmed. But we've got it for when we go away, so we may as well use it.

Well imagine this scene a couple of night ago: It was 2 c'clock in the morning, we were both fast asleep when we awoke to this blaring racket right outside our bedroom wall. That's where the siren is located. 'The alarm went off,' I muttered. Next to me, the Blogger said, 'What alarm?' while she is madly scrambling for her iPhone. 'Our alarm,' I shouted over the racket. She just looked at me, puzzled. I pointed to the alarm panel on the bedroom wall, 'that alarm.' She finally got the message and clambered out of bed to the panel. There she looked at me, still puzzled. Both of our poor old hearts by now are racing ten to the dozen.  We both have a seperate code to use the alarm, so I gave her my code and told her to press it to stop the damn thing. That confused the poor girl totally. 'That's not right,' she said all the while punching in keys, obviously wrong ones.

Ok, I thought it's time for me to get out of bed. I jumped out of bed and raced over to the panel trying to enter the correct code. 

I looked and looked but I couldn't see a thing. Two reasons for that. Well three actually. It was 2 o'clock in the morning and the lights were out and I wasn't wearing glasses. The third reason, I have to have the cataract in my left eye operated on in February, which didn't help at that point. I clambered back over the bed to my bedside table feeling for my specs while the Blogger is still madly punching numbers at the panel. I'm thinking, the neighbours must be cheesed off with us. By now it feels this damn siren has been going off for hours, but then I remembered most of our neighbours were away, except one lot across the street who have a screeching bird in a cage in the back yard, that goes off any time of the day. So they don't count.

Bespectacled I eventually got back to the panel and after a few goes, entered the right number. Phew, the noise stopped, but now the phone went.  It was the alarm monitoring people. 'Is everything alright?' she asks. I explained what happened to her, saying I thought it might have been a gecko walking over one of the sensors downstairs. 'Better check, to make sure,' she said and 'good luck trying to go back to sleep.' I gingerly crept down the stairs and into the garage. No one there, then I crept into my office, turned on the lights, no one there. Longingly looked at my computers, all still there.

Heart still racing ten to the dozen, I locked up again downstairs and we climbed back into bed. The lady at the monitoring office was right though, it took us forever to get back to sleep.

I am presently spraying around the sensors to stop our little house mates getting near the sensors.