DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Our room at the B&B in Sutter Creek offered the usual amenities: fancy breakfast, gourmet snacks and champagne at happy hour, enough pillows on the bed for a family of Hydras (Hydrae?) and, refreshingly, less than my total annual capacity for cuteness.

The phone policy impressed me immediately: local calls are free and unmetered, and there is no surcharge to access long-distance carriers. Even better, the phones were not hard-wired, so plugging the telco line into my laptop was a breeze.

And although I didn’t use it, the inn offers wireless net access too (albeit for a fee). After witnessing all this convenient technology, I was not surprised to learn that the owner works for Intel.

The nightstand of every room hosted a white-noise machine. I found this to be a nice touch, useful for masking the sounds from the neighboring room. Or our own (ahem!). There were six channels of sound available: surf, stream, rain, waterfall, and one that seemed to be silent except for occasional sounds of skidding tires and then metal impact, glass breaking, etc. I think that was the “blizzard” channel.

Actually the sixth selection was a heartbeat sound, the use of which I do not understand. We took to calling it the “stalker channel.” It was spooky and unnatural — who regularly falls asleep to the sound of an amplified heartbeat? I thought maybe the manufacturer included that sound for use by newborns. But then I realized that no newborn would have arms long enough to reach out of the crib to turn the thing on or off, making it pointless after all.