Christmas night I came home and heard some beeping but since it was so faint I decided to put it off and go to bed. Around 6 a.m., I woke up because I heard the beeping over the furnace's rumbling so I waddled into the utility room and listened around wondering if this ancient furnace had some newfangled doohickey that'd alert me to some trouble.
That's when the furnace cut out and I still heard the beeping. Waddled into the kitchen and heard it even louder than before. Shit, Olympics Guy left his stupid piece of shit alarm clock on so I thundered upstairs, cracked open the fusebox and killed the power to his bedroom which only seemed to make the alarm clock angry. Perhaps I should've flipped through raddidge's book before I wrapped it or when raddidge offered it to me on Christmas afternoon. Now the clock, instead of going beep-beep-beep, it was going did-did-did--did-did-did in a really high pitched fashion. Once I restored the power, it returned to its regular beeping.
Anyway, I tried waiting it out and after an hour I left a message for Olympics Guy on his cell, turned on the bathroom fan for some white noise and turned on my bedroom fan then poured some hydrogen peroxide into one of my ears while pressing the other tightly against the pillow. Now it was somewhat quiet.
Olympics Guy came down the stairs and asked me to step oustide. Woo hoo, he showed up to turn off his stupid alarm clock! Outside he shouted at me that I interrupted him at a funeral and broke down crying. When I went back inside, the landing and the stairway leading to my apartment was painted bright red. In fact the red lightbulb at the top of the stairs made it glow even brighter! My bedroom was painted a deep ultramarine.
I winced a bit, "Dune prequels? They're not very good."
"Well, do you know a lot about science fiction?"
"Sure." and she asks me to help her find a present for her husband.
I picked out Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan and described it as a science fiction pulp fiction detective novel. I didn't go so far as to say it was better than William Gibson and lacking his effete fascination with gimmicky terms and absolutism in regards to dystopia. She seemed happy with it, I showed her that I was picking up the second novel in the series so there's a good chance that it doesn't suck.
I'll never know the outcome of her Christmas but I do hope something good came out of it.