Only, now it’s a different beep. Just a short, single, beep.  Like a mean dog trainer shouting  “You vil heel.”

Beep. “Your lunch is getting coooooold. Look,  hammerhead, (‘That’s Mister hammer head to you.’) you’re not the only one waiting for me to warm their meatloaf.  If you don’t want to hear the beep, then get up off your fat butt dialer. Get your ooky looking goulash and get out. BEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

And just after I tried to understand what the dishwasher was saying. What an odd little bucket of bolts.  It doesn’t speak so much as it rumbles and shakes. Like a driverless cement truck that jumps the curb.

It rumbles like an uncle clearing his throat or signaling for a Heinecken maneuver.  You pack it full of the good china and drop in one of those  plastic-wrapped  horse chestnuts of soap with the red dot in the center. They look almost good enough to eat and you’d think it could at least say “Don’t eat those, you idiot.”

(‘That’s Mr. Idiot to you.’)

From another room comes the voice of K-Mac: “Are you talking to yourself again, dear?” There’s no way to answer  without feeling like Mr. Idiot. “Are you doing both sides of the conversation, dear?”

Wait a minute. What’s that blaring WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH from somewhere outside? Almost like a car horn. Uh oh. That is a car horn.  But is it our car horn? I shout ‘K-Mac, is that our car horn?’ She says something helpful like “What car horn?”

Here’s a tip I’ve picked up over years of hearing car horns at night. “It’s always your car horn.”  Then, at 3 a.m., with the neighbor pounding the door and you spending precious minutes looking for your other slipper — but you can only find the foot to your Fred Flintstone costume — and you finally open the door and… the farouking horn stops.

Beeeeping. Rumbling. WAHHHH-ing.  Did I mention beep?  Is it irony that I used to think Latin was hard? Or just a cosmic BWAAAHAAHAA?