Thursday, April 9, 2009

My Quest for the Silent Mode

Have you ever tried to be quiet? I mean really really quiet?
Lately, I have been required to lead a really quiet life from a particular time of the day. There are so many reasons why someone might have to be quiet. Here are a few ranging from fairly common to quite dramatic:
  • Your family members or housemates are asleep and you dont want to wake them;
  • You are in the library;
  • Your housemates are studying for a difficult exam;
  • You are stealing without a weapon;
  • You are trying to hide from a predator or an attacker.
  • You are having a late night chocolate fix that hubby doesn't approve of.
  • etc
My life is fairly simple at the moment so all the above reasons don't apply. The only reason I have to be quiet is that I'm usually awake till 2am and everyone else (or more precisely, the other two members of my nuclear family) are asleep.
Being quiet is really of great importance because those of you who are mothers understand the weight of this sentence - You dont want to be waking your baby up after you've spent like 2 hours to get her to sleep in the first place....not at 2am! Another things is that since Im on maternity leave, I can afford to go to bed by 2am. However, Kachi will strangle me (well not really, but he won't be impressed with me) if I wake him up around this time because he wakes up at 5.30am to go to work...and he finds it difficult to go back to sleep after being disturbed.
Dear friends, these are the conditions that hang over my poor little head when i'm frollicking on the internet or watching a movie till 2am.

Well I have been trying my best to be as quiet as I possibly can, but I have not been successful. Let me walk (or tiptoe) you through the process-----
I usually put Izabelle to sleep around 9pm but then she usually has a feed around 12pm. cool. The problem begins when I try to tiptoe out of her room (after the woooooooooo moment, remember?)...when I tiptoe, my toe knuckles make cracking noises(am I right to call them toe knuckles?). I have been thinking of a solution to this and asides from going for an ancient Chinese body detox and traditional medical treatment, the only other solution that I figured out was eating salmon. Yes, because I heard that Salmon had good oil in it and I assumed that it will lubricate my joints. (don't burst this bubble if you're a medical professional though because the lie that I dont know might continue to work for me).
My noise problem continues because as I head back for my computer, I decide that its time for a night snack, since the last time I ate was around 8pm. At this time of night my fave snack is a cup of Milo. So I tiptoe noisily to the kitchen and open the fridge door. Oops, my fridge door makes a popping sound when I open it, however, its noisy sin pales in comparison to the next one that is about to be committed by the Microwave!
I really wish I didn't' need Mrs Microwave's services at this time of night, but I love to warm up some milk and then stir in my Milo. That's the way I love it. So even though I cringe when the microwave door opens noisily, the major sin of the night happens when the microwave beeps. OMG, in the dead of the night, my microwave's beeps sound like SIRENS!!!
I even try to reduce the duration by stopping the thing at 0.01 seconds but I still end up with 2 beeps - Stop and Clear.
I recover from this pretty quickly though because I've still got the milo and that gives me enough reason to forgive the multitude of sins committed by my inanimate electronics. However, the night is still young and more noise is yet to be committed.
One is by my computer when I switch it off, however the one that I dread the most (that is, second to the Microwave beeps) is the ceiling fan switch. I reckon it sounds like the cracks of a horse whip and there are usually T-W-O that need to be switched off. (please remind me why I bother to sleep late?)
As you can see, my quest for the silent mode is well placed. The only reliable inanimate friend I've got in my house is my little nokia phone because its got the SILENT MODE!! This means that even though i'm lying right beside Kachi, I can text myself to sleep without waking him up. Just out of curiousity, have you tried to text in the dead of the night? Try it...you wont realise how loud your keypads are until you do.
Having the silent mode option in my phone made me wonder,"why does my microwave not have a silent mode button?" I mean, its great that It likes me to know when my food is ready and all, but at 2am, I'm standing right in front of it and really can't afford that luxury.
Also, if my fans had a remote control, I could switch them off without having to wake everybody! Iwouldn't mind a fridge that I could open discreetly either.

I would like to believe that these techonological suggestions already exist (I have a standing fan that has a remote control), so I have made the decision to do some research into these solutions.
I'm optimistic that I will find positive results, and I will make sure that I save these results and pictures of the electronics with such features in a folder in my computer because I've got a plan.
My plan is that on the day that Kachi will tell me, "baby, I've been thinking 'long' and 'hard' on this and I think that it is time for us to buy or BUILD a house", I"ll respond with, " WOW, OMG, THAT IS SOOOO GREAT. Hang on, I've already compiled a list of NEW stuff that need to go in the NEW house!" and then I'll fish this list out!

I'm not sure how many years it'll take for the above scenario to play out so at the moment I'll just keep eating my salmon and dreaming about my brand new 'silent mode button' enhanced electronics!

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