Dingbat

Have you ever done something by accident that was so entirely stupid you want to kick yourself?

Thursday, I had to take Charlie to the vet for his post-op recheck. And so I have the normal rush of getting the kids' shoes, socks, faces washed, hair combed, jackets on, backpack in tow, into the car and strapped in, AND wrestle Charlie into his carrier and get him into the car. So I was finally in the car with everybody ready to go and I hit the garage opener, turn the key and start to back out.

Only the garage door wasn't completely up yet...

Now this was an extremely windy day. When we heard the deafening "bang" and felt the car hit something, I thought the wind had blown the trash can over and that is what I had hit. It wasn't until I was out of the garage that I saw the door was bent up and not completely up. Ah shoot. Only I didn't say shoot.

So I get out to inspect the damage and there is a "bolt" of sorts that it rolls along the track that is bent in a bracket and won't let the door move. There are some dents on the door itself but not too bad. Problem is the door won't go up or down and we have to go or Abby will be late for school. So I lock up the inner door, which I had never done before and off we go feeling very weird about leaving with free access to all the stuff in our garage.

We get to school, and I realize I had looked at the garage damage, but not the car. So I go around the back and there is a taillight near the top of the hatch that I hadn't really noticed before. It wasn't broken, but the plastic was popped up. It popped right back in, luckily. There was some paint scratched off.

Abby gets to school, Charlie sees the vet and is fine, and I go back home and try to mess with the door. I try to manually pull it down, but it won't. But whatever I did caused a tension wire to lose tension, so now the door is drooping on one side so it is crooked in the track. Great. I call the number to the garage door guys that they left on a sticker when they originally installed it and wait.

We go pick up Abby and finally the guy calls me back and he can't get out here that day, it'll be next morning. Sigh. So we had to sleep with the garage door up. As a testiment to the nice neighborhood we picked, everything was still there in the morning.

The guy showed up, and within 10 minutes it was fixed. It works just fine. There is only a small dent near the bottom. So some major luck was involved because what could have been a whole door replacement turned out to be just an $80 service fee. Hooray for small miracles.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "door ding"...