Tick, Tick, Tick

I am at my computer, working on this blog post just now and I am hearing a ticking sound.   It's a fast tick, and it's faint, but I can hear it and I know the sounds that should be heard at this desk and ticking isn't one of them.

I asked my husband to come over and he, too, heard the faint ticking.   So I beat on the desk and startled my husband.  I explained I was too lazy to get up, and I'm trying to scare the chirping, ticking bug outside into stopping for a few seconds so I can go on with this blog post, tick-free.   But the crash of my hand on the desk and my husband's loud exclamation does nothing to cease the sound.

So my husband gets up and opens the door out of the basement.  He tells me to come outside because, "you're got to see this."  But I'm skeptical.   As I come outside though, I see what he wanted me to see: a distant electrical storm in the night sky that was stunning.   It was too far away to hear, thus making it innocent and in no way responsible for the ticking sound.

After a few minutes of watching the storm, we went inside.  I picked up the laptop and listened to the silent piece of hardware from multiple angles.    Then, we decided to turn off the printer beside the laptop, because that was the general area the ticking was coming from.   That was another adventure in and of itself, because we couldn't find the power switch.

But no, the printer wasn't to blame.   After a minute, my husband says to me, "it sounds just like a stopwatch.  Didn't you have a stop watch?"   And yes, I do have a stop watch.  It is of the very old, windup variety and only counts up to thirty minutes before it starts over, but I love it and I always keep it in my top drawer.   Only it shouldn't be ticking, having long wound down years ago.

Then my husband says, "wait a minute, I saw Greyson playing with it earlier; he must have put it somewhere."  So we start to look, only where could he have put it?  If you know me, you know I have this sort of tidy/clean slate/minimalist thing going on and right now the only thing on my entire desk other than the computer itself, is a single thank you card I need to write.    Suffice it to say, there are not a lot of places to hide a small ticking device in and around my desk.

And yet, there was ticking.   We look all over, my husband even opening up the printer innards to make sure my son didn't try to add it in as a fifth toner color.   Then, we opened the paper tray and all the way in the back we found the ticking stop watch.

I'm not sure how long it would have ticked, but I think we would have had a failure to print had we not discovered it.

The Big Boy Update:  We asked my son what he wanted for dinner at the Mexican restaurant last night.   He responded, "why do boys have lips?"  After we got his order finally sorted (there was more questioning along the boys and lips line) he asked one final question, "do boys have lips so they can kiss?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter will crowd you out of your seat if you're in a booth sitting beside her.   She isn't particularly clingy in general, but she wants to be right up on you when she's at a booth.   A while back, after my husband had kindly asked her to move over to share the space with him on more than on occasion, she suddenly said, "I don't have any space!"

Fitness Update:  Not ten miles.   It was four miles I ran, but I forgot to turn off my running app so when I got to my next destination in the car my phone happily announced over the car's sound system, "ten miles."