Last Week....

Last week was a pretty eventful week for us in Upstate NY.  Right at the beginning of the week, we got smacked with two storms right on top of each other.  The first storm high on Tuesday morning and dumped about 6" of new snow during the day.  This wasn't a huge amount of snow, but for some reason the towns decided that it wasn't worth plowing, so the roads were an absolute disaster.

The second storm started early Wednesday morning (about 3am) and proceeded to dump another 5" of snow.  It was supposed to be more, but the change-over to wintry mix and sleet happened earlier than the forecasters thought.  So we ended up with less snow, but with a coating of junk on top of the snow.  By Thursday, everything was cleaned up.

Unfortunately, Thursday was eventful for us anyway.  With the additional snow (and lots of snow in the mountains), Rich decided to take Thursday off from work and go snowboarding.  I was getting ready to come into work when he went to leave the house.  About 2 minutes after he left the house, I heard a big bang in the garage.  I couldn't imagine what had happened!

I pulled on a bathrobe and walked into the garage to find him getting back out of the car with this scared look on his face.  Somehow, as he was pulling out of the garage, the automatic door decided to close...ON HIS CAR which is only 15 months old!

Rich had opened the door, walked to the end of the driveway to see if it needed to be shoveled, walked back in and started the car.  As he pulled out, for some reason, the door decided to close and it didn't respond to the pressure of something underneath it.  So the garage door dented the roof of the car, scraped it up a bunch and broke off the antennae.  The door also came off the track at the bottom panel and the bottom panel was bent inward by about 3" at the bottom.

It was quite a shock and has been just a pain in the butt since then.  We got a quote from the car dealer that it will be about $1000 to fix the car (expensive, but not awful).  We're still waiting for the garage door people to come out to tell us how much that will cost.

The biggest problem at this point is the door.  With good intentions, my father-in-law came up on Thursday to see if he could bend the door back in and fix it.  Unfortunately, when he bent it back in, he had to take off one of the pulleys that keeps the door on track and in doing so, the chain that helps support the weight and keep the door balanced came off.  With the chain off, the door is completely unbalanced and only Rich can open and close the door.  I don't have the strength to open/close it with it being unbalanced and unsupported on one end.  Its just a mess at this point.


Part of the reason of having a house is having a garage where you don't have to park your car outside and scrape it every morning.  Plus, if we get the snow they're expecting us to get over the next day or so, I'll have to shovel out my car.  Argh!


Anyway - enough of my ranting.  Hopefully the forecasters will be wrong and we won't get much snow. ;-)