We are relaxing after our trip to Italy, but not too much. We had a neighborhood dinner/concert last night. Today we went to an afternoon performance of the play “Souvenir”, about Florence Foster Jenkins. She was a woman who couldn’t sing a single note in tune, but became famous for her singing. The person was real. The play was based on her life. It was an excellent production. There’s also a movie about the woman which is quite good.

When we got home, one of our smoke detectors was beeping and others were warning that their batteries were extremely low. I thought that odd because I had changed all the batteries not long ago. But I went out and got new batteries. I saw a 12-pack of AA Energizer “Max”. The pack also said “Try Ultimate”. It wasn’t clear to me whether “Max” or “Ultimate” was better, but Max was in the battery rack and that’s what I bought. I put them in the detectors and was still getting low battery warnings. It didn’t seem possible that 5 different detectors got the same defect at the same time. I started reading discussion boards. The first two had no useful information. Likewise the first thread on board number 3. I found a second thread and, 2 pages later, found that these smoke detectors require AA Energize “Ultimate”. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I went back to the store and found the Ultimate on a different rack. Then I understood. The Ultimate are Lithium batteries. The Max are Alkaline. I had used the wrong batteries. And I had used the wrong batteries earlier when I changed them. Let that be a lesson — Ultimate is better than Max. What surprised me is that I had stuffed the Max batteries back in the blister pack. Target gave me a full refund.

That’s the news for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.