There’s stuck and then there’s…STUCK

I heard this morning that despite the Valentine’s Day storm, this winter Boston has received merely 14% of its usual snowfall totals. A welcome respite for many of its denizens, as last year was a back-breaking record-buster.

Here, too, in the Valley, we haven’t been faring much better this season. Well, of course, if you’re not a big fan of the white stuff, you’ve been in hog-heaven. I’m not a skier, nor especially wild about winter driving, but I’d hoped to try snow-shoeing, and I guess I’m going to have to wait until next year to give it a whirl. But I do like that feeling of being snugly snowed in, with food and cable and electricity, while the world becomes a snow-globe.

Somehow being trapped in the house is fine when there’s a snowstorm. It’s fate. There’s nothing I can do, so I might as well look out the window at the snow piling up and make another cup of hot tea and get out the journal or a DVD or the book I’ve been meaning to delve into.

But getting stuck in the house is different when the roads are passable.

This happened last week.

We had a spate of bad household karma. Mercury must have been in retrograde, the gods of things mechanical were not smiling on us, or it was just one giant coincidence, but one after another, things malfunctioned or broke.

• As Fred the Plowman left the run-up to our driveway a mess (For those of you who have not had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with our driveway, it hooks backward from the road, goes uphill rather steeply and around a curve into a circular drive which (finally) is flat. The "winter strategy" is to pass the house, turn around in the neighbor's driveway, then gun it up ours so you don't get stuck.) I spun out halfway up, tried to back down, got stuck in a snowbank and had to be rescued by Husband. He wailed on the tires for a while, trying to get out of the snowpack, then managed to back up all the way down, turned around in the neighbor's drive, then summoned the spirit of his favorite NASCAR driver and pedaled-to-the-metal all the way up. It was a bit embarrassing for me, and fortunately, the car is no worse for wear, although minus a little tire rubber.

• My bad luck with hot beverages continued when a full mug of tea (a mixture of ginger and detox) accidentally tipped over into the keyboard, shorting it out and confusing the computer to the point where Husband had to drag it to Mac repair-land. (for the sake of brevity, I’m leaving out the sequence of events that lead up to the vein on Husband’s forehead throbbing) Fortunately, the computer was only confused to the point where it didn’t cost too much money to make it right again. And the keyboard, once Husband took it apart and dried it, was fine.

• My treadmill started rumbling like a magnitude 6.2 when I reached my usual walking speed. But it only needed a minor adjustment and a good cleaning and I was off and…er…walking again.

But right between these two problems came the largest. My automatic garage door broke. Not merely broke, but both wires snapped and the door could not even be opened manually (like we have to do when we have a power failure). And, we found out later, what sounded like a loud THUMP and shook the house on Saturday night was actually the sound of the main garage door spring giving way from metal fatigue. God knows where the remains wound up. But a very good thing neither of us were in the garage at the time.

Of course this happened on a Sunday, when the outfit that “fixed it” a few months before wasn’t open.

I hadn’t planned on going out that day at all. I’d had a relatively busy week, and was looking forward to a day just resting and puttering around the house and not driving.

But just knowing that I COULDN’T leave the house made me want to escape as if I were a caged animal. I could have clawed the walls down. It took me back to the days when my back hurt so badly I couldn’t get out and would just stare out doors and windows with my fingertips against the glass, feeling oddly like a dog waiting for its owner to return.

But with some deep breathing and meditation, somehow I made it through.

And the next day we got the repair guy to come and rescue me.

And I thought again about how, in this age of having everything you want right away, how dependant we are on our electronic whos-its and gizmos. (while I type this on one computer, transfer it electronically to my laptop, then post it on the web…) That the world comes to a halt when the computer goes away for a while. And like I secretly enjoy the silence of blackouts, I kind of like when there’s no computer, too. (as long as I know it’s not out having hundreds of dollars of repairs and it will be back soon) It forces us to remember what it was like not having this electronic umbilicus we plug into each day. Not that I don’t enjoy the benefits of instant communications, (I’m rather fond of this blog, and like the idea of monitoring my page hits on AC and making a few dollars writing some article or whatever while looking out the window at some beautiful scenery) but sometimes it takes a few deep breaths away to appreciate them.

And read a book. And actually…talk to each other.

And no, I didn’t spill the tea into the keyboard on purpose.