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Saturday Night, Locked in the Goddamned Garage

westport

So I'm at my Dad's place for the weekend. He had to get some little surgery thing done on his bellybutton and my stepmom was going out of town. I was going to hang out with him, do the heavy lifting and see my friend J who is a librarian nearby. I should have known bad things were going to happen when my friend J called from the hospital. Seems she's had her gall bladder removed in sort of an emergency fashion the day before. As you may know, my Mom has been in the hospital lately, and my sister caught the cold from hell. I was doing well, until....

I've been sleeping badly lately. Little noises drive me nuts. I assume this is stress, and seasonal changes, and quitting smoking (oh didn't I mention? guess who's irritable!) so I try to roll with it. Last night I noticed that the room I'm staying in had a pernicious hum. I traced it to the fan that was on in the garage. They call this guestroom here "the cottage" but it's a fancy room over/next to the garage. Anyhow, I turned it off but there was still some hum and I eventually got tired and fell asleep anyhow.

Tonight after my dad retired with a bottle of wine and a stack of magazines (his normal MO and the reason I don't visit more often unless I bring an accomplice) I decided to check out the garage. It's full of junk from the upstairs of the house that they're getting remodeled (another reason for infrequent visits, constant remodeling and associated bitching about contractors and plaster dust), I mean full. So I crawled around some, unplugged the flourescent lights that were humming and decided to close the door and see if I could tell if that took care of the hum. I just assumed there was an "open the garage door" button on the inside of the garage as well as the outside. There wasn't. The door closed, the light went off and I was locked in the goddamned garage on Saturday night, in the dark, and I'd just personally unplugged the lights from the hard-to-reach outlets in the ceiling. Fuck me.

It wasn't totally dark. The battery charger -- which I'm sure was also giving off noxious fumes -- jad a blinky LED that gave off just enough light to make out some shadows. I managed to climb on top of an upended couch to see if the garage door opener had an on/off switch on it (no). I felt around for a flashlight, nothing. I felt around the door to see if there was a push button opener there, nope. I tried opening the door by hand, nope. I did trip over a floor lamp which I managed to drag over to the socket where the battery charger was plugged in and bingo, lights. So now I'm locked in the goddamned garage on a Satuday night looking at myself all dirty and pissed off in the mirror thinking "You are a piece of work, you know that?"

Ideas that I try and discard: phones, but there aren't any there, ditto for walkie talkies and palm pilots. There is a DG One laptop in its original box and I think a) I feel like I'm in a fucking Zork game and 2) it would be a Slashdot-worthy hack if I could get the thing rigged up to send a message to anyone, maybe make a front page post to MetaFilter: "OMG, get me out of this godforsaken garage." In any case, Macgyver I am not, and hungry I am.

I decide maybe I can rouse my Dad now that the light is on and I only look like a partial shithead. I bang and holler and bang and holler and either he doesn't hear me, or he's partially unconscious or he's getting his gun. I don't even know if he has a gun but it occurs to me that this would be a truly terrible way to find out. No response from the big house, so I start investigating the door. Automatic garage doors aren't really that sophisticated. In fact this one had  just a few parts that attach it all to the chain drive thing in the ceiling. It's a tinkertoy, basically. And while I may be locked in the garage with a bunch of silly furniture, I am also locked in the garage with a tool chest!

The two bolts holding the door to the chain drive have nuts of different sizes, meaning there were a lot of trips up and down to the tool chest. What do you think, SAE or metric? Metric. 14 mm and 12 mm. Once I got the door part off of the pull-the-door part, I could open the door enough to scoot under it, but any futher and the two parts jammed together and the door wouldn't go any higher. So this was a pickle. Fix it for now and never be able to open the door again, or stay in the garage like some idiot martyr. I propped it open using a stepstool and considered this. If I got squished under it, my Dad would come out in the morning, view my smushed corpse and be forever perplexed. I decided to set the garage door to open, using the "open door" button that I could now reach. The mechanism scoots along the ceiling without opening the door along with it. I open the door myself and prop it open with a ladder.

I am free! I'll fix it tomorrow. For now I need to figure out where all this freaking noise is coming from.

update: someone on IRC said last night that there must have been an emergency handle I could have pulled to have gotten me out of this mess more quickly. I asked my Dad about this today and he said there wasn't a handle, door's too old. He also thought the whole thing was funny. He also said that there is an open button on the inside... but when we went to look for it, it turned out to be two wires sticking out of the wall that you'd need to hold together to operate the door. No surprise I didn't know this.

the journey is the blah blah blah

sunset driveway

It's been an odd set of months. I've had an incredible amount of freedom to do whatever I want, and I've also had some serious limitations that balance and offset those things. The highlight of the past few weeks has been getting to explore Braintree and my friend's little cabin here as I wait for things to settle down in my own house (landlady en route to the Peace Corps, not there yet) and go back and forth to MA to visit and tend to family.

If I didn't feel that there was something a little off about a woman my age running around living out of her car and a backpack, I'd think I'd finally made it... someplace. With one job I can take with me and another that links me to the place I love to be (and enough money to go the other places I still want to see) I'm liking it. And yet, in some sustainability way, there have to be in-person people to balance the online posse of librarians and bloggers and friends and strangers that make up my digital social network. Right? Maybe?

Finding the balance - enough real people to stay connnected, not so many as to be crazymaking - is the order of the next few months. People I know often seem somewhat surprised at how many other people I know, and yet I probably spend more time alone than any one of them. I wonder if it's like some sort of XYZ Anonymous thing "Hi my name is Jessamyn and even though I have a lot of friends I'd like to be a friend of yours" where whatever trigger most people have that says "I think you've had enough" is a switch that never flips.?

In any case, I'm on the road again to see Mom, and then Dad, and maybe a pal from high school. I'm slowly making peace with the absurd amount of driving required to maintain an existence hours away from any major metro area, though I traded my iPod for some php programming, so it's a few hours of classic rock in store for me. As always, send postcard to box 81, Bethel Vermont 05032. I like mail.

QotD: An Unforgettable Home

What's the most memorable building you've lived in?
Submitted by Shelly.

I lived in the Odd Fellows Hall, on Market Street in Ballard (Seattle) for almost three years, rent free, in a weird basement apartment. It wasn't just a place to live, it was my job. I was the caretaker. Now, having free rent (no bills, not even phone) and a small salary in the 90's in Seattle was sort of awesome, but not as awesome as having costumes in the basement, or something that looked like a real-life skeleton, in a coffin!

I would mop the floor and clean the bathrooms and keep the schedule and open the doors for groups with names like the Loyal Order of the Golden North and the Daughters of Pocohontas. Because the other Odd Fellows Hall was in Capitol Hill, the gayer part of the city, somehow we got a few alternative groups there such as Girth and Mirth (chubbies and chubby chasers) and the Northwest Bears. All these people were, to a fault, nice and interesting and totally different from me.

The apartment was a railroad apartment where only the kitchen on the end has windows that faced the outside. Two more rooms had windows that faced a narrow hallway and one room had just a door with a mysterious ice cream type window and no other windows at all. I moved in their with my then-husband and moved out on my own a few years later. I don't think he ever loved the place as much as I did. Once he moved out, I slept on the couch for a while, and later moved the bed into the living room where it was like perpetual twilight.

Since I was the caretaker, I could also rent the place for free, and so we, and then later I, would have big parties almost monthly. Called the Rent is Theft series, the big feature was the open mike night we'd call Odd Stock. People could do whatever they wanted on stage as long as it was seven minutes or less. The last time I heard from my ex he was emailing me to say that he's still in Seattle and was having another open mike night and I was invited to come if I was in the area.

Now I live in a town with about 15 times as many people as would come to my biggest parties then. A big party here is getting a few couples together for a BBQ. I still put the job on my resume if I'm looking at doing something involving scheduling or maintenance or living in a hidden hobbit hole in the middle of the big city for free free free. Now I live in a creaky Victorian house in my small town, for free, and wonder if things have changed much after all.