Amy Versus the Garage

Things were a little quiet in blogland the past few days. Besides having my brother here for a visit, we had a kee-razy wind storm on Saturday that knocked the power out for most of the daylight hours. Luckily, my parents had the girls, so I only had to entertain Sammy and Freddie during the outage. Fred is easily pacified with a boob full of milk, but keeping Sam happy required a little more thoughtfulness.

It was ironic, really, that the power went out all day Saturday. On Friday Sam asked a ton of questions about where electricity came from and how it was made and how it got into our houses and what uses electricity and what did people do before there was electricity and and and. We answered the questions as best we could, and then told him that this summer we'd camp in the backyard and see what it was like to not have any electricity!

Less than twelve hours later, we found ourselves in the ideal situation to discuss what things use electricity and what things do not.

I felt bad for the kid, because he had just started playing a new Wii hockey game that he been waiting all week to play, when the lights went out. Luckily, in addition to Wii the kid loves the card game UNO, so we played that until I couldn't stand it anymore. And then we got a battery powered lantern and used it to look for things, like coats and shoes, because by lunchtime, we were a little stir crazy. I figured we could go out to Chick-Fil-A for lunch, since they have a pretty awesome indoor playground, and then go and mill around at Target, where I had some things to return. I was hopeful that by the time we returned the power would be restored.

One little problem, though, were our plugged-into-the-wall electric garage door openers.

Now most electric garage door openers come with a pull cord that, in case of a loss of power, you can use to manually open the door. Unfortunately for me, SOB skipped this step when installing my garage door opener in the interest of saving time, thinking he would come back and finish it another day. In his defense, the only reason he was trying to save time was probably because I was standing at the door tapping my foot with a baby on my breast, a toddler wrapped around my leg and two other kids screaming and yelling behind me. However, at that moment when I realized that my garage door was essentially locked shut, well, my memory wasn't so clear. And there may have been some quiet cursing of SOB's name.

After a few frantic phone calls to my husband (who was working) and my dad (who was wrangling my girls) I did get enough information to figure out how to open the door. This would require the use of a ladder, though, which was up on a hook on the wall, just out of my reach. Luckily, I also have a step stool, but it wasn't quite high enough for me to reach the garage door mechanicals. But it was high enough for me to reach the bottom of the ladder hanging on the wall. With great care, I was able to lift it off of its hooks and set it down where I needed it. After jiggling a few parts and pulling out a peg, I was able to deactivate the locking thing and open the door!

All the while, Sam is watching me intently, and occasionally fetching me my phone so I could send irate text messages to my husband.

So now I could get the door open, but for some reason it wouldn't stay open. Later SOB determined that it had something to do with how the doors were hung 21 years ago. GREAT. I tried to think of a way to prop the door open safely enough that I would feel comfortable driving my car under it. Looking around, I saw shovels and brooms, but none of them were tall enough. Then, in a dark alcove, I spied a cluster of things that had been in our yard back in Philly, including an eight foot tall shepards hook that we used to hang our bird feeder on! After some clever positioning, I had this:

I loaded the boys into the car, tucked in my side mirrors, and very slowly, very carefully, began backing up. The last text message I sent to my husband that day said only one word:

VICTORY!