Can't fix this. Might as well fix dinner.

At four p.m. on Monday afternoon, I lost my mind.

Standing in the laundry room with a pile of temporarily-dirty clothes, with a cat twining between my feet and a half-finished song lyric bubbling through my vocal chords, I was completely unprepared for anything out of the ordinary.

BANG!After gravity reasserted its hold on my feet, the Panic List took over my mind. OhmyGod…burglars-gunshots-mutant-furry-cockroaches-in-the-garage-ohmyGod-ohmyGod-hiiiiiiiiiiiide!

Tenzing continued to twine himself around my feet, purring. We like to joke about how they wake up in a new world every thirty seconds or so, but it was so plainly obvious that he'd already forgotten that the noise even happened.

Dammit, I thought, if they're coming to get me, the clothes are at least gonna be clean first. I moved the newly washed laundry to the dryer and set the washer to begin washing the next dirty load of clothes, put on my shoes (after all, your destiny will always be easier to take if you've got on a pair of comfortable sneakers) and cautiously opened the door.

No burglars.
Well, this was promising, at least.
No giant, furry, mutant cockroaches either.
Definite bonus.

I rested my left hand against my car, leaned on it for a few minutes, and wondered what I should do next. I knew I'd heard something (in the same way that I know, without needing a mirror, that my hair still hasn't quite turned red yet and never will).

I had two options:

  1. Laugh uneasily about the weirdness of the situation. Confess my fear that something was actually wrong. Call Jeff, who would be back at the house in about an hour and a half anyway.
  2. Tough it out. Assume that if anything was actually wrong, I couldn't fix it anyway, and wait until Jeff got home and hope that we ended up getting a good laugh and a domesticat entry out of it.

Naturally, I took option number three: I went to the computer room, started coding, and completely forgot about the problem. (—no similarities whatsoever between my cats and myself, no, really!) Upon finishing a chunk of code, I went back into the kitchen and began crafting dinner.

I never hear Jeff drive up when he gets home; my first indication that he's there is the sound of the garage door motor slowly winching the door six feet off the ground. Today was no different: rrrrrrrrr —okay, that was no different—crunch!—that definitely was different.

He tried again. rrrrrrrrr—crunch. I put the meat back on the cutting board and walked into the garage.

Funny, I thought, I don't think the top of the door is supposed to bow inward like that when you try to—rrrrrrrrr! open it—crunch! —and I don't think it's supposed to go crashing to the ground like that, either…

For the majority of my existence, I am best classified as a dreamer; someone who likes to imagine the beauties and intricacies of possibility more than the humdrum tedium of everyday life. However, given the right event and right phase of the moon, some stout Germanic great-great-great-grandmother's practicality occasionally reasserts itself.

Can't fix this. Might as well fix dinner.

I was back in the kitchen, calmly preparing dinner, before Jeff even made it to the front door.

"Garage door won't open."

"I know."

"I'm going to take a look. Back in a sec." He returned a few minutes later, motioning me to come out to the garage. "Come take a look at this."

I walked out, dusting my hands on my hips, and stared at what looked (to me) to be a completely normal garage.

"Look up at the top of the garage door. See that spring?"

"Yeah. There's two of them."

"Only supposed to be one."

"Oh. That's a bit of an issue."

"I don't suppose you happened to hear a loud noise sometime today while you were home?"

(OhmyGod…burglars-gunshots-mutant-furry-cockroaches-in-the-garage-ohmyGod-ohmyGod-hiiiiiiiiiiiide!) "Funny thing, that. Now that you mention it…."

* * * * *

Only cost $95 to fix. In the meantime, with my car inside the garage and the spring broken, the car and I were stuck here until the repairman got here early this morning.

It could've been worse. Just imagine the entry you would've just finished reading if it had been a giant, furry, mutant cockroach.

The world trembles in fear.

all tags: 
cats
silly
laundry

Comments

On , gfmorris said...
We don't tremble in fear ... we look forward to such things with bated breath.

On , lukas cobb said...
It would have been interesting if the spring broke during the middle of the night.

On , gfmorris said...
No, not really. We had that happen once at our house, IIRC, when I still lived at home. Just imagine two NRA members, one a retired Air Force officer, reacting to that ...

On , Monica said...
I have a great way to deal with such surprises in the car... Hear a weird noise that you can't do anything about? Turn up the radio! I figure that has to work at home, too. A good thump thump you can identify is better than UCNs (unidentified creepy noises). If you'd like that NWA CD you gave me back, I'll be glad to oblige!

On , Nanette said...
That happened to me too! I think I was at my parents' house, home alone, and it was nighttime. Scared the living crap out of me. I thought it had come from the kitchen, so I just avoided the kitchen for the rest of the evening. Weird noises tend to scare the crap out of me, though. This has been more of a problem now that I live alone. My upstairs neighbor slams his door at least three times a day, thus shaking every door and window in my buidling. My first thought is "someone's trying to break in." About two seconds later, Rational Me kicks Wild Imagination Me in the head and says "don't be silly. It's that buffoon upstairs slamming his door again." I should be used to it by now...

On , jowilson said...
No, if it would have happened at night, there would be a couple things that might have happened. Certainly, Jeff would have gotten a day off work (unless he figured out some way of getting the truck out of the garage anyway). As far as waking up is concerned, they either would sleep through it, wake up and realize they heard a loud noise, or wake up and not realize why they woke up. My mom was living in these crappy apartments once and all of a sudden she woke up and was very frightened and didn't know why. When she started moving around, she realized she was covered in pottery fragments, dried flowers and baby's breath. Then she heard a faint knocking on the door. "Hey lady... you okay?" A very sheepish looking man was standing at the door, and explained what happened. He lived next door and was selling a gun of some sort to a guy, they were handling it, and it accidently went off. The bullet went through a whole bunch of interior walls, broke a vase of dried flowers on a shelf above my mom's bed, went through another wall, and lodged itself in the wall in the bathroom. But, she said, for that first thirty seconds, she had no idea what woke her up -- just that she was very scared. Her first thought was that it was some nightmare, but what the hell was up with the pottery fragments?