I have a 3 month old mini schnauzer puppy, and I live in a 6-floor apartment building. My building has annual fire alarm/smoke detector testing sessions…Basically inspectors and firefighters come to the building and test to make sure that all apartment units’ alarms work. So starting from noon until 7:30 pm, ALL the alarms in the whole building are gonna be ringing repeatedly. :/ It’s a pretty damn annoying day, but it’s only once a year. Anyways, they purposely choose a weekday, avoiding any holidays, in hopes that they wouldn’t bother too many people, but my puppy and I are home tomorrow. It’ll be the first time my puppy will hear those irritating and ear-piercingly LOUD smoke detectors, and I’m worried about what her reaction will be. Until last year, I’d just stay outside all day to avoid all the headache-y noise, but this year I have a young puppy and taking her on a whole-day walk outside isn’t an option cuz it’s raining 50+ mm of rain tmrw. I mean, I’d have an umbrella and raincoat, but what about my puppy? Yeah, just great. So…what should I do? Do I comfort her if she barks? I’d hardly blame her for barking though, the noise is seriously loud..
And come to think of it, I wonder what all the other dogs owners in my building (there’s quite a lot of them) do on this day?

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On Waking

When you think there is nothing left to see,
crush the color from a daisy,
letting it sweat into your fingers like rain.
When you feel there is only the bitter air
in your lungs,
scrape the hue from a turned leaf,
uncovering the life underneath
its shield of glossy death.
When your path is too deeply cut
and the ache of humanity
is cooked into your skin
by the ferocity of the sun,
pull the Earth from its stead,
and let the cool dirt
be
you.
Great pic, Danny.

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Okay – a year a go we had a pipe burst outside the house and the water basically ran down into our foundation in our furnace room and flooded the basement. Probably a good 2 inches of water throughout the basement (finished basement – living room, bedroom) Replaced all the carpet and the drywall about 2 ft up from base. Insurance covered this. They didn’t cover the pipe repair outside that caused the leak – but the inside they did. So now, we’ve discovered we have mold in our bedroom. It’s fairly obvious that it’s being caused b/c any moisture coming from outside (rain) is all running down now to where the water made it’s path to the foundation the first time, and then it must be sitting there. Insurance is balking at this. Saying they’re not responsible. We can fix the mold. We can fix the drywall. But it’s just going to happen again next year. Anybody?

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I’ve been reading the "Rain" series of contemporary fiction novels, and Rain (an assassin) has a detector he keeps in his pocket that "detects" some kind of wave length (side-band? or similar I think it was called) that video camera’s produce. The detector also detects audio surveillance. The author never differentiates between wireless and hard-wired devices, this little thing picks up everything within about 10 meters or so if I recall correctly.

I’m just wondering if that is actually possible or if it is literary license. If it is possible, how?

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Ok, zombies will, eventually, become a real threat, and when that day comes we will all need to have an escape route. My plan is to arm myself in a light fashion in order to take the fastest and most secure route to a harbor, where I will find a boat. From there I will navigate my way to a remote island with enough wood and space for me too live for a while. I will also, of course, circle the island a couple of times and keep it under surveillance for a couple of days before "landing" there, in order to make sure it isn’t already inhabited by zombies. I will then make myself a home there, eating fish and whatever vegetables and plants that I find on the island. I will get water from rain and seawater that has been boiled and "cleaned" from salt.

After a year or so I figure that the zombies will have died from starvation, so then I will leave my haven on the island and return to the mainland. Before actually landing I will survey the shore in order too make sure that it doesn’t have any zombie infestation, and thus I will have survived the event. If the place still is infested I will just return to my island and come back later to check again.

Logically the zombies wouldn’t be able to swim or drive a boat. Perhaps they would be able to reach my island by walking on the seafloor, but I find this very unlikely as their lunges and stomach would fill up with water and eventually burst. Besides, why would they even try to get there, as they probably wouldn’t know that I was there?

It is my firm belief that an island really is the place to be during a sudden zombie infestation, because that is the one place they might not be able to reach. All other places is within their ability to get to, so if any place is safe then that would the island.

Besides the risk of starvation or death by thirst, and in some cases the risk of freezing to death, I really do not see any flaws in this plan once I reach the sea and find the secure island. But have I missed anything? And do you have a better suggestion?

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I live out in Dallas and what’s known as a "luxury" apartment complex. The only reason we moved in was because we had heard such great things about it and the price was worth the space. It started out with not being able to move in after we were given our keys because it was a roach house. Our white walls were specked with brown, crawling, scattering creatures. It was disgusting and impossible to kill and clean. I shouldn’t have had to sweep up dead roaches every morning before I left for work. This moved on to an ant infestation, followed by window leaks with moldy smells during that period of torrential, non stop rain (for anyone living in the Dallas area if you remember those really floody two weeks). We were then over run by bed bugs which they refused to take care of for two months because when we had first complained it was contained in one bedroom and they wouldn’t do anything unless it was all over the apartment so I was bitten to death and went to work swollen, red and looked like I had been abused by my boyfriend. After that, we were great for about a month thinking all our problems were solved. The next nightmare started with faulty wiring causing our electricity to trip every time we did something. Being nerds we’ve got our computers running at all hours but as normal humans, we also like to take showers, watch tv, cook, have the lights on and generally live a normal life. We were told that it was our fault the electricity kept going out because by cooking, having the tv and computer going with one of us taking a shower we were tripping the wires and causing our electricity to fail. I filed complaints for over a month with a rude maintenance man telling me it was their fault and the wiring was frayed and old, having never been changed. It took a new tenant moving into the building and having the same problem to get this fixed. (3 month period) We actually used flashlights and candles when we came home from work because we were too scared to turn on the electricity.

Things were better for a few months until last night. The fire alarms went off at 4 am and were not fixed till around 6 am. All the tenants walked through their apartments to see if any of us had left an appliance on and then were told it might be a chemical reaction in the building. The fire fighters had no idea what was wrong or how to turn the alarms off because the panel was inside a tool shed that was completely locked up. The maintenance man admitted to us last night that the panel to the fire alarm controls had to be changed months ago because they were old. That’s unacceptable to me. I don’t pay 1000$ to live in an apt with faulty wiring and bug infestations.

I tried to talk to the apartment manager but because of the amount of complaints she’s been getting from her tenants, now refuses to work on the weekends. The leasing consultants told us it had been fixed two hours after we went to bed. Sorry, but i don’t believe them. I’m not trying to be rude or bothersome but I think these are hazards that should be taken into consideration immediately.

Sorry for the long story but…is there any way I can file a complaint because I cannot get the manager to respond and the leasing consultants refuse to give any information about fixes or solutions.

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I would be able to encase it so It would not get water damage from the rain, the only problem is that my cable to hook it up to the tv is only 2 ft. I need a 20 ft cable, would there be any other problems with this

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I have this motion sensor light above the door of the garage and it was great because I go back and forth from the house to the garage and I can see where I’m going even at night. The problem is, it just stopped working. I replaced the bulbs, still doesn’t go on. I even switched the sensitivity to the maximum limit and it doesn’t work at all. It is right beneath an awning so I doubt the rain would have damaged it. Any idea you can help me with to fix it?

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