[I’m copy/pasting this from a little site I keep over at vox. I do my main blogging here, but every now and again I’ll write a little essay there.]

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 I decided to check out the garage. It’s full of junk from the upstairs of the house that they’re getting remodeled, 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.

I left my camera at my Mom’s house. It’s okay, I have a backup camera. I’ve been walking around, as I do in early October here thinking “My gosh it’s the loveliest place in the entire world. One of these days I should take a few pictures of this lovliness. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time….” and then it happens. It goes like this every year.

The sky clouds over. A few little drops fall. People head inside for warm cider and pumpkin whatever. I went to get drinks with a friend a bit of a drive away. When I got on the road to go home there was a howling maelstrom of leaf-pummeling wind and rain. The roads were slick with water and leaves. Headlights shone on tall curtains of undulating mist and spray. As I got closer to home, driving on smaller roads, the streets were yellow and orange with leaves and even branches.

I got up this morning and it’s still lovely outside, with a lot of color, but there are also a lot of bare branches. You can notice that the foliage hues are starting to wane instead of emerge. Up until yesterday, Autumn was a “you just wait…” promise. This morning it’s giving a “get the soup on” wave as it heads for the door. I don’t have my camera with me, but I hope this gives you a picture.

October has been knockout lovely, which is super because it’s otherwise been a bit of a rollercoaster. I’ve been down in Boxboro this weekend hanging out with my Mom who is home, but not supposed to drive or get in a car for the next month or so. Hanging out with her coincided nicely with my strong need to get/stay out of the house, so it was an extra good time: going for walks, taking insect pictures, eating all the food people brought over, sleeping til 10, running errands, feeling useful. My favorite part was staying out on the porch after everyone else had gone to sleep — my princess-and-the-pea need to be the last person awake is part of my current troubles — and listen to the acorns slowly drop off of the trees and bump bump bump down to the ground.

I’ve made some deals with myself to make sure that all my couch surfing and guestroom hopping doesn’t detatch me entirely from my nice little life in Vermont. The specific problem, which I may not have mentioned, is this. There is a new roommate at the house who is going to help with bills once Ola joins the Peace Corps. He’s nice, tidy and a little noisy having never lived in the country before. Once Ola leaves (before Thanksgiving is the current date) it will be the two of us. For now, it’s the three of us — one early riser (5 am) one late-to-bed-er (1 am) and one person who has a very hard time sleeping when other people are awake, especially in stressful times like these. I also do a lot of my work from home and the adjustments are a little hard to make. I’d rather be someplace that is guaranteed quiet at night rather than have ongoing conversations/discussions/talks/arguments about how much noise is too much noise and how can I possibly be kept awake by such tiny noises. I don’t like being a light sleeper, but the times at which it’s a problem are the worst possible times to work on it.

So, the wealth of guestrooms I’ve been staying in — nice and quiet all of them — has really given me the downtime I need to deal with all the other new and not-as-new stuff going on in my life lately. My deals are to swim whenever I’m near the pool, to try to keep the eating regimen pretty on track, to change out of PJs before noon and to not write any of my talks last minute. Starting in the end of October, I’ll be on the road for work more than I’ll be home and it may be just superstition, but I think that overplanning for some of this can’t hurt.

I went to Fargo, North Dakota and talked about the digital divide. They said, yeah they knew about it. I ate some candy and drank soda and got weird looks when I said I’d like to eat a salad. It was a nice fun trip. Even faster, and possible funner, was going down to Darien Connecticut for Library Camp, a gathering of techie librarians at some sort of unconference. I got to drive down with some friends in a nifty little Scion boxmobile and met a whole bunch of neat people while I was there. I even did a little presentation on accessibility called “I know what good web design is, why don’t you know what good web design is?” which I think is a great title. Yesterday I was all set to talk to local parents about Internet Safety, but no one showed up at the library, so I got to talk to librarians about Internet Safety. We all messed around and laughed at MySpace (are you on MySpace? I am on my space) and learned a few things. I’m not sure how to make people show up for a talk about Internet safety, but lord knows people could use it.

My Mom is home, home from the hospital. I’ll be going down to see her this weekend. She’s not supposed to drive a car or even be in a car for six weeks which is really a bit of a hassle if you don’t live walking distance from anyplace and your side hurts. She’s been in good spirits and healing well, send her cards if you’re inspired. She likes mail.

I’ve been doing my usual itinerant thing, going from place to place. I’m still not settled in to my new house situation (new roommate, landlady home a lot of the time, high personal stress level) so I’ve been hiding out at other people’s places. There’s something calming about being someplace that isn’t yours, to me. The latest crash pad is my friend Jim’s place in Braintree. It’s up a mountain somewhat and every morning as I drive down into town to get coffee or hit the pool, I’m blown away by the things the trees are doing. I can see them tree by tree down here, but up there you can see a whole ridgeline at once and it’s glorious. Couldn’t do it year round, but it’s nice for now.

Fargo had a lot of elm trees, big stately elms, on the sides of the roads there. Apparently they’d survived the Dutch Elm scourge. It was neat to see them, all over the place like regular trees. Survivors.

You know that thing that spaceships do, where they go around a planet and then use some sort of slingshot effect to leave the gravity of that one planet and propel themselves into space? That’s me lately. Here is the photoset from my Fargo trip which was just a quickie go, give two talks, come back trip. Today I’m off to Connecticut via New Hampshire where I’m psyched to be attending Library Camp.

I’ve spent the last six nights down in Boxboro where my Mom lives. She’s been in the hospital and you can read more about that here. She seems like she’s on the mend, heading home soon, and out of harm’s way, but the whole last few weeks have highlighted for me how you’re never really out of harm’s way. I’ve been sort of the email coordinator and special lieutenant in charge of morale for the past few days. Now that I’m home, I’ve hit a bit of a wall and I have to use the energy I have to get ready to give a few talks (already written, thank jehu for planning ahead) in North Dakota on Friday.

Anyone who would like to help on the morale angle can send my Mom a get well postcard. She likes mail just like I do: Liz “jessamyn’s mom” West, 526 Stow Road, Boxboro MA 01719.