Week 30, 2026: Low battery

An alarm woke me up on Monday. It was loud and it wasn’t coming from my phone. I stormed to the kitchen, trying to guess which appliance could produce such a terrible noise. Nothing seemed suspect. I unplugged the microwave. And waited. It beeped. I waited again in case it made a mistake. It beeped again. I got back into bed and ignored it as best I could with a book. Will I have to deal with this when my flatmate goes on holiday? I think I’d rather just live with the noise. Dying fire alarm battery, I later learned. I met a nice man at a golf club. His fifth sentence on the first topic change was I’m okay with immigration but I worry about whether they’d fight for the country if a war ever took place. I said that was a fair concern. Since learning how young Canada is, I’d taken to asking white people about their lineage. His was English. He got teary-eyed at the mention of Queen Elizabeth’s death. I was in England when it happened. My strongest memory from that time is a girl telling…