The Alarm

As I write this, the smoke alarm in our house is going off. It is loud. Yes, once again, my brother Joel has lit a fire in our fireplace, and once again, his promised-small-fire has reached gargantuan proportions. So large, in fact, that it set off the smoke alarm. Mom is teaching a piano lesson at the moment, so I would imagine that the alarm is rather distracting, despite Joel's Herculean effort to silence the alarm by furiously waving his shirt at it. That technique is proving rather ineffective.