"I'll kill the old red rooster when she comes" OR "Please hit the snooze button on the chicken!"

We slept with the windows opened last night. It was so amazing. And it was 60 DEGREES this morning when I got up. Notice I said GOT up, not woke up...A little background, we have roosters about 1/2 a mile from our house that crow and squak all...day...long starting very early in the morning (like sometimes 3-4 am) and don't stop until it's late in the afternoon/early evening. Since Rowen (our hen) started "crowing" a month or so ago, I've been pleased to observe that she actually only crows when the sun is actually coming up, about 6:45 or 7:00am. I've mentally praised her intelligence and the excellence of her circadian rhythms, until this morning. It was late (like midnight) when I got to sleep last night...mental note, don't take vitamins after dinner!... but I was looking forward to sleeping well until about 7. Well, at 5:12 this morning, Rowen started crowing! What??!! Does she always do this and we just don't hear it b/c the windows are closed? And she didn't give a "Good morning" and stop, she kept going. About every 20 seconds. I covered my head with a pillow and could still hear it. I didn't want to close the window, because the weather was SOOO nice! I thought, she'll stop soon. Nobody's listening to her. (Usually the other hens get up and start clucking around when she crows). Michael got up at 5:30 and Rowen was still going. I asked him to please hit the snooze on the hen. He just laughed and took his shower. I realized that the reason that "We'll kill the old red rooster" when "She'll be comin' 'round the mountain" has nothing to do with the chicken and dumplings of the next verse. "She" probably has a young baby and just put the baby to sleep and doesn't want the rooster waking her up just as she's getting to sleep. Better to kill the chicken before she gets around than to leave it in the hands of a sleep deprived mom! Anyway, Rowen stopped crowing and then started up AGAIN about 6:15. I pressed on back to sleep. (I'm good at this by the way! :-) ) And then just before 7 something woke me up again. I listened. It wasn't the hen. It was a chirp, kinda like tennis shoes on a basketball gym. In a semi-regular pattern. One chirp every 30-45 seconds. Yep, it's the smoke detector. It needs a new battery. Of course this only happens when you're in bed, or in a rush out the door. I remembered that it started beeping yesterday while we were scrambling to get to co-op classes. And our ceilings are like 12 feet high, so grabbing a 9 volt and a chair is not an issue. Otherwise, I probably would have done it yesterday, even amid the scramble. So, I've sent Jeremy out to get a ladder to change the "chirp". And, I'm out of bed. And guess what, the sunrise was really beautiful! Worth getting up for!