HOWDY PERK!

How Did Your Thursday Go?

Wait! Let me tell you about ours.

Our Thursday started out at 3:20 in the morning. Willow woke us up to let us know the smoke alarm in the basement was beeping. I am going to put her in for an award, or at least give her a rawhide chewbone.

I went to the basement and did not see any smoke. I thought the batteries were going bad and took them out and went back to sleep. Later I went about my morning business such as going for a walk and emptying the dishwasher, etc. When I returned I put new batteries in the detector and it started beeping again. It wasn’t an instantly constant beep. It beeped, or chirped, about every 45 seconds, give or take. Sometime in there I read on the cover it was not only a smoke detector but also a carbon monoxide detector. Opps!

Anna was up by then and I told her. She immediately went to Google carbon monoxide. We knew it can kill you but we wanted to know about how it gets in the house. Anna read that natural gas heating a water heater or the furnace should have a clean blue light. If not, it could very well be emitting carbon monoxide.

We called our heating and air man and he suggested to take the little detector out in the opened air, like put it on our deck, and try it. We did and it still beeped. That told me it was more than likely defective. He also suggested we call 911 and get the fire department to come out and give our house an accurate reading.

Anna belongs to a homemaker’s club. At the meeting last month a lady from the 911 Service gave a lecture. She encouraged them to call 911 and them decide if it was an emergency or not. We called and the operator sent a fire department crew directly to us without their sirens on – it wasn’t that much of an emergency. However, the operator told us to stay outside the house until it is resolved.

The fire truck came with four or five fireman without their firefighting gear on. They combed the house with their gadget thoroughly and got a 0 carbon monoxide reading. They suggested we buy a new smoke/carbon monoxide detector.

We do not have carbon monoxide. Good!

Next we went to Marietta Museum of History to hear a talk given by Judge Conley Ingram, retired justice of the Georgia Supreme Court. He talked mostly about Judge Hawkins and what a great judge and how he earned his reputation as being fair and hardworking. Judge Ingram gave a good talk. He has a humble down-to-earth way about him which reeks honesty and fairness.

Afterwards we went to the 2nd floor of the museum where the exhibits are. Also at the lecture was Clara Howell, my high school science teacher. We just saw her Saturday at the GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE festivities in Glover Park. In front of an exhibit of the Old Hospital is a poster telling about it. One of the sentences really gripped her – she said it was a false statement about history of Marietta. The sentence said something to the effect that the Old Hospital served the white population in Marietta only. Mrs. Howell said her father was a doctor there and she was there enough to know that blacks were patients there too – she said they were segregated but they were patients also, being cared by the same nurses and doctors, on a wing by themselves.

I got a museum officer, who I feel is a friend, to come over to the exhibit and had Mrs. Howell explain it to her about the wing for black folks does not mean they served only white folks and so on. The officer said she would get it changed.

Mrs. Howell’s father was Doctor Welch – or Welsh. She said her father, the two Haygoods, and Doctor Perkinson were the doctors of the Old Hospital.

Speaking of Doctor Perkinson, I always see his daughter, at various lectures and concerts we go to and I always speak to her like I know her, which only this day did I find out her name. I always thought of her as that "graceful lady". She came up to me after Judge Ingram’s talk and said, “Hi, my name is Perk!”