White noise

The other day I was staying in a guest house that someone provided me in Moab.  It was a two-night stay.  The view is gorgeous in Moab no matter where you are.

When I got back to the house on the second night after a great hike, the battery in the smoke detector was dying.  You know what that means, right?  Really loud chirps every thirty seconds or so.  I was dead tired from getting in very late the night before, so I really needed some sleep.

I'm in an unfamiliar house, it's ten at night, and I know where nothing is.  Even if I could find a nine volt battery (or go buy one) I couldn't change it because the smoke detector was on the vaulted ceiling well out of reach.

I closed the door to the bedroom.  That helped some, but I knew that I'd be constantly thinking of when the next chirp would come and I'd never get to sleep.

So, if I couldn't eliminate the noise, I decided to try and drown it out.  I downloaded this free white noise app for my iPad.

I tried several of the calming sounds.  I knew I couldn't turn up the volume too loud, or I'd never get to sleep anyway.  The campfire app sounds like a crackling fire with crickets in the background.  I found the perfect volume so that every time the smoke detector chirped, it just sounded like one of the crickets by the fire.

I slept like a baby.

Larry Thomas is who, now?

I met Larry Thomas.  I even got a picture taken with him, though he was ignoring me at the time and maybe didn't actually know.

Larry Thomas played the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld and he came down to the Owlz game a few weeks ago as part of a promotion for Gandolfo's, which wanted to sell some soup. So, they brought in a guy famous for telling people they can't buy soup.

I'm sure it worked, because the line for Mr. Nazi for signing the ladles that the Owlz gave away was super long.

By the way, Larry Thomas has also played Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

This is Thomas as Osama walking with some schmoe who's playing President Bush.

When I googled Larry Thomas Saddam Hussein, no picture came up of what I was looking for, but I did find this one, which is of neither Hussein or Thomas, but I thought was funny enough to post anyway.

He also told a story about when he was on an airplane and a flight attendant said to him, "I guess no soup for you?"  The guy sitting next to him didn't get it.