Smooth Operator

We're trying to sell a household trash compactor that came with our place, and I finally got a call from my Craigslist ad today. Since the compactor was buried at the back of the breakfast nook, behind several houseplants, six bins of recycling, and a stack of moving boxes, I came home on my lunch break to excavate it. Everything was going well, until I set a milk crate on top of the shelving unit, turned to push a plant out of the way, forgot about the crate, and tried to put my forehead in the same space it was occupying. Ouch. That's what...about a five second retention? Jesus. Luckily, the big red mark faded by the time I got back for my afternoon meeting, but the spot still hurts when I touch it.

Of course, smashing my own head into a milk crate that I placed on a shelf only moments before pales in comparison to what I did last Thursday. I had to park the CR-V on the street out front since the electricians were coming to rewire the garage and carport, which would've been fine...except for the ice storm. By the time the electricians finished and took off, my car was covered with a coat of ice. I scraped chipped a hole over the windshield and on the driver's side of the back window, and then set off to pull the car around into the garage. Apparently it didn't occur to me to scrape the side windows so I could actually see around the corners as I went around the block. I suppose I could've pulled over and got out to scrape some more, but I felt like that would be really embarrassing. I got the window to roll down so I could see out, and was only marginally being splattered with still-falling freezing rain, so it didn't seem like such a big deal.

The remote for the garage door opener mysteriously vanished between the day of the inspection and the day we moved in, and no one who was in the house in the interim admits any knowledge of what happened to it. Thus, to open the garage, I have to get out of the car, walk around to the garage's side door, stick my arm in and hit the button, then walk back to the car and pull in. When I pulled up and got out, the rain was starting to come in through my open side window, so I rolled it back up to keep my seat dry while I trotted off to open the garage. When I got back, I needed the window down again so I could back out and correct my angle. This time when I rolled down the window, the ice sheet did not go with it. It's hard to express in words how quickly the following events transpired. Basically, in maybe one or two seconds, I went from "What the hell?" to "Ooh, the ice window stayed up! That's kind of wicked!" to "AIIEEE!" as the glittery ice window collapsed inward and shattered into pieces on my face.