Flower Friday : : Asian Lily

John ordered these lilies from a catalog and didn't realize that they would grow to be four feet tall! I I went out today in search of a flower and the entire plant had blown over and pulled out of the ground, so it seemed like the logical candidate for today's shot. It's strange weather today...cooler but humid and cloudy. 

Last night we watched grandson Owen's 8th grade graduation on the computer. Or at least we tried....He goes to a virtual school, new this year in their district, and I think they were still working out the kinks in how to organize a virtual graduation. We had only gotten the notice from our daughter-in-law an hour in advance, and were told that Owen was valedictorian. I had to upgrade my zoom app before we could watch. It wasn't clear if they had turned off our sound and camera, but since it was dinnertime we decided to go ahead and start cooking while we waited for Owen. 

The timing couldn't have been planned any better. Just as it was Owen's turn the smoke alarm went off.  John was frantically trying to turn it off and I was frantically opening doors and turning on fans. In the end, John pulled the wires out and silenced it, but by then Owen's part was over and they were  winding up.  I texted and confessed to Joni and she sent me a copy of his speech. I think we all have something to learn going forward with the Vista Virtual Academy.

I should mention that this is the only smoke alarm that is hard wired. We were supposed to replace the batteries in the other four once a year, possibly when we turned the clocks forward to Daylight Savings Time.  Of course we never had the batteries or the motivation to do that so when the battery died, the alarm would chirp intermittently to let us. know. Of course it always started chirping in the middle of the night, and we could never figure out which one was chirping, which is why we replaced all of them with new ones with ten year batteries.

It is interesting that when the entire neighborhood was on fire and we were frantically trying to evacuate, none of the smoke alarms went off. Nor did they go off when the fires weren't that close but the smoke from them was blowing in our direction and blotting out the sun. If they weren't so fiendishly loud that one can hardly think, I think we would be inclined to ignore them altogether.

It took John two ladders, three screwdrivers, a headlamp .an hour and a lot of bad words to reconnect the tiny wires today. We didn't even bother to test it....