The Quiet Safety Check I Keep Doing

I don't always have a dramatic week to write about. This was not a dramatic week.

What it was, mostly, was a safety check week. The kind where you go around the house doing things you've been quietly meaning to do and then feel both productive and slightly embarrassed that it took this long.

It started Tuesday. I'd added "Replace door alarm batteries" to Our Minneapolis Home a few days earlier and then marked it done on June 24th, which was a whole thing because I had to find the right batteries and also convince Eli that me fiddling with the door alarm didn't mean I was changing anything about how the door works. (I wasn't. He was right to be suspicious. I explained it twice and showed him the alarm still beeped. We moved on.) The door alarms are on the exterior doors, and we've had them for two years. They're not fancy. They're just a layer. But they need working batteries or they're decorative, and I needed to know they were actually functional.

Same day, I logged $43 for "Safety lock replacements" on Our Minneapolis Home. Some of those locks were getting sticky and one was just worn out. Done.

Then on June 26th I ran through the sensory room. I'd added "Inspect sensory room safety equipment" as a task and marked it complete the same day, which is the kind of same-day turnaround that only happens when something is genuinely fast. The wall padding is still holding since Mark fixed the velcro back in April. The room is fine. Eli's been using it more now that summer's here and the structure of school is gone, so I wanted to be sure everything was solid before the unscheduled weeks really kicked in.

Also flushed our water heater on June 26th. Marked "Flush water heater" complete on Our Minneapolis Home. I know, I know. It's one of those tasks that feels fake-important until your water heater gives out and someone tells you it was sediment buildup and you think about how you had a task for that and just kept deferring it. I stopped deferring it.

The Naples condo got a version of the same treatment from a distance — I added "Flush water heater" there too and got it done on June 27th. Hurricane shutter maintenance came in at $95 on June 25th, which is just the cost of owning something in Florida in June. You pay it and you don't think too hard about it.

None of this is exciting. But there's something that feels right about a week where the safety stuff actually got done — batteries, locks, the sensory room, water heaters. The list is shorter than it was on Monday. That's enough.