Too cold to venture outside, blasts of artic air, so I sit in the window, pretending I am in Florida, watching the birds - I call them "my birds" because I feed them.  A red bellied woodpecker is on the deck, finding uneaten sunflower seeds that are stuck in the cracks of the deck.  He finds one, then flies to the deck, to open it and eat it.  In the summer I clean out these cracks with a dull kitchen knife, so it makes me smile to see him doing the job for me.  The kitchen timer goes off and I am reminded of probably the weirdest thing that happened last summer.

Every morning Timmy and I do the crossword puzzle, I make a copy so we each have our own to work on.  I started to notice every morning at 8:30 a quiet beep beep that went off.  "Do you hear that beep?" I asked Timmy.  "What beep?"  He couldn't hear it.  The next day I heard it again.  Again, he didn't hear it, claiming "you're losing it" and maybe I was.  I thought it came from the kitchen so I checked the cabinets for something, anything that would beep every morning at the same time.  I found an old calculator that was suspect, but nothing there.  The next morning I heard it again...ran into the kitchen and this time took everything out of the sewing cabinet and even Timmy checked his gym bag for anything with a timer set for 8:30am.  He still didn't hear it, but I was so adamant that he kind of believed me.  That night I told Sabra about the mysterious beep and she promised to come down the next morning and help us get to the bottom of this beep.

The next morning, there we sat, the three of us waiting for 8:30 and then---the beep.  She heard it too, and we all ran into the kitchen.  I opened the drawer with the meat thermometer in it - was that it?  But Sabra was staring at Timmy, and said "Tim, the beep is on you - what do you have in your pocket?", But he just pulled out his old wallet, that 25 years ago a co-worker had thrown into the garbage.  "Not that", said Sabra, and started to laugh.  "It's your watch".  He held it to his ear, and finally heard the beep, beep.  Mystery solved.

That afternoon he figured out how to unset the watch - a watch he had gotten from the free table at the gym, and the object that had baffled me for days.