Modern Conveniences

This evening Rena and I needed to pick a few things up at the store, so we ate supper at a local restaurant. It was snowing quite heavily while we were out and the lesser traveled roads have a couple inches of snow on them. As we turned into our driveway we did something unusual for us. Rena pushed the button on a remote switch in our car, the garage door opened and we drove right in!

We built this house just over 26 years ago. It is situated on a slope which makes part of the basement exposed. A one-car garage takes up about 1/4 of the basement. It has a sectional roll-up door but I never put an opener on it. (The garage serves as a woodworking shop at times so our vehicles are accustomed to being outdoors.)

Feeling like we're getting old enough to not have to scrape frost from car windows or clear snow and ice off a vehicle every time we need to drive somewhere, we decided to do something about it. We got each other a garage door opener for Christmas.

January second we went a monster home improvement type store and picked out the appliance we'd promised each other. A helpful salesman showed us where the garage door openers were and asked us helpful questions to try to steer us to the more expensive models. One thing he asked was, "What brand of garage door opener are you replacing?" "It's an Armstrong" was my reply. He looked puzzled for an instant but quickly realized that up till then it was an arm strong garage door opener.

I had a great time installing the opener. It's been quite a while since I'd bought a Christmas gift of the "some assembly required" kind. Now, our challenge is is how to manage two cars and one really convenient garage.

How I spent January 3rd.