Beyond the silver rainbow: Rude awakening for the "au-pair"

Yesterday the plans for this day seemed quite relaxed. While my wife would spend the day visiting a local high school, I'd take care of some au-pair duties. Dishes, grocery shopping and IT-support. So I spent half the night at our laptop trying to figure out to create the perfect panorama picture combining several pictures. As it sometimes happens, when investing a lot of time into a subject, expectations go up and mediocre results are not satisfying anymore. At 3am I finally gave up and used the program I tried out second..... A wonderful eight hours of well-deserved sleep began...

...until I heard a long beep and a voice:
"May I have your attention please. An emergency has been reported in the building. While this report is being verified, please leave the building using the exit stairway. Do not use the elevators. BEEP. May I have..."

Quite annoyed I checked the time, 8.20am. Staying inside and having possibly a fire in the house would make me even more unhappy. So I got dressed, got up and went downstairs to go outside. There were a few people, including our room-mates from India. Some electrical wire installation went wrong in the building; a few wires were mixed up. Back in the apartment, all sleep was gone and I stayed up, having breakfast and starting my au-pair day.

Dinner was prepared by our Indian room-mates with adjusted levels of chili for us, yummy!

For today nothing else happened besides 10-15 more so-called fire-alarms, version 1.2. I had one addition from the guy in the reception: "Please disregard all fire alarms". Hopefully they don't work in night shifts.

As for last couple of days, we stayed mostly in College Park, once shopping to the outlet center in Hagerstown. Our aparment building is called the Varsity. My wife gave me a tour on Sunday and in the evening we went for a walk on the Paint Branch Trail which led us to lake Artemesia. There, the evening sun was shining so nicely, that I decided to take several pictures for creating a panorama picture later...