Selective Hearing

It is after 11pm last night and I had just crawled into bed and I must have awakened him. He gets up much earlier than I do and so goes to bed earlier. He gets up and goes to the bathroom and comes back to bed and just as I am drifting off to sleep he says, “The smoke alarm is beeping.”
“What?”
“The smoke alarm is beeping like the battery needs replaced, it must be one of the ones down stairs”.

I roll over onto my back, I had my good ear to the pillow so I couldn’t hear anything, and after about 30 seconds I hear this very faint beep. Sure enough it is the beep that a smoke detector emits when the battery is low. I know this because we had two of them on the same evening a few weeks ago start beeping. At that time our son, replaced all the batteries in all the smoke detectors so as to not have them all start beeping.

I get out of bed and go out into the great room upstairs and stand. No beep. I go down stairs and stand. No beep. Finally, I go and open up the slider to the back yard and stand on the patio and I hear it. The beep is coming from one of the houses across the street. Because we had our windows open upstairs he could hear this very faint beep.

Here is a man that when he watches TV it is usually turned up on the loud side, to the point that if you want to have a discussion it has to be turned down and yet he is hearing this beep from across the street.

I closed the windows in our bed room and said good night, another mystery solved. It is often said that husbands have selective hearing and my husband proved it last night.