How Big Is Your Car Hole?

For a long time now I've enjoyed talking about the size of garages on houses. Granted, some people, like Moe on The Simpsons, don't approve of the word garage, as explained in this exchange:

Moe: Garage? Hey, fellas, the garage. Well, ooh la-di-da, Mr. Frenchman.
Homer: Well, what do you call it?
Moe: A car hole.

Still, la-di-das aside, I think what got me started talking about garage sizes was when I heard someone talking about how their house had a "one and a half car garage."

"A 1.5 car garage?! That's absurd!" I said. "Is that for your extra half car that you have lying around?! Reediculous!"

Had I applied a bit of a filter between brain and mouth, I might have been able to figure out that it kind of makes sense to talk about garages that way. I mean, garages can be useful for holding things other than cars. They're dead useful for storing things like tools, lawn mowers, rakes, boxes full of random A/V cables, fishing gear, and other things that one doesn't use all that often and/or that just don't have a sensible home inside. Anyway, after hearing about a 1.5 car car hole for the first time, I started noticing that the size varied quite a bit.

By way of example, Lawton must have at least a 2.5 car garage, given that it can hold 2 decent sized cars with ample space between them for opening doors and even some room left over for storing some other shit. I've claimed for years that my mom has the biggest no car garage in the world, full to the brim as it is with junk and Emergency Backup Furniture just sitting there hoping that some of the Primary Furniture will break or be otherwise ruined thus leaving an opening for EBF to gain entry to the house.

When the Girl and I moved into the Halfway House, I decided that we have a 1.0 car garage. I suppose there are some shelves at the end of  it that make it a tad bigger, but it's not much more than 1.1 at the most. My car is both long and wide, meaning that I have to favor the right side when I get to park in there just so I can open my door enough to get out. I also have to pay attention to how far I pull in there to make sure there's ample room for the door to close. Still, a 1.0 car garage is better than no car hole at all, and I'm generally glad to have it.

As as aside, I should mention that the Girl and I have differing opinions about the garage door and just how important its status is in our daily lives. Whenever we leave together or come in through the garage together, she is always very insistent that she watch the garage door to make sure it closes all the way. She claims that's important for home security, in that it helps make sure no one can enter our garage as the first step in stealing her. Her insistence on watching tends to annoy me, because the garage door is clearly going to close all the way. After all, that IS why we have a garage door opener, and there can't really be a problem with a piece of machinery doing such a simple job that it has done many times in the past. Never mind the fact that there have been a few times when the door allegedly went almost all the way down, only to change its mind and rise up again. That was due to some rakes partially covering the sensor, a situation that I have since remedied. I suppose to give you a complete picture of our differing opinions about the garage door, I should mention that there are times when I will leave via the garage in the morning well after the Girl has gone off to work (having parked across the street to avoid having to move the car out of her way in the morning, thus giving me some extra snooze time in the AM). We have a couple of locks on the front door, and it's much simpler to just hit the close button on the remote than to deal with the multiple locks. A couple of those times, I have received calls from the Girl asking me why in the world the garage door is not even pretending to be closed, and I have had no choice but to sheepishly admit that not only did I not watch the door close, I never even hit the button to tell it to close. So ... we definitely pay different levels of attention to that garage door.

The other night I came home from work after a pretty long day with several work things bouncing around my brain. I parked in the driveway, hopped out, and came in through the front door, only to discover that the Girl was putting in an even longer day at work. So I went back out through the garage and pulled my car into the car hole, still thinking about work. On my way in, I hit the button to close the door, paying its ensuing activity all the attention I typically think it is due, which is to say none. A while later, the Girl finally made it home, and I heard the garage door start to go. I figured she must have also had her mind on work to open the garage door when she knew I was already home and parked in there. No matter, though. I waited for her to come upstairs. And then I heard the door opener start up again. It seemed to be going on for a while. Something was not quite right. So I hopped up and went down to see what was going on. I poked my head out and asked, kind of smiling, "Why you keep runnin' that door up and down?"

"I'm not. I'm just trying to close it. It was wide open when I came home."

"Whaaaaaattt? Oh no."

And I walked around to the back of my car to see the results of my distracted parking. Apparently, I had not made sure to pull all the way inside the garage. Thus, unsurprisingly, the garage door had encountered my rear bumper and absolutely scraped the shit out of it in an attempt to close before deciding that something was wrong and going back up. That sequence repeated itself twice when the girl came home and tried to get the door to close.

The moral of this story? I think there might be several, most of which I'm probably not clever enough to grasp. In fact that may be one of the morals. But the ones that are apparent to me are 1) don't park distracted, 2) don't think about work when you're at home -- or anywhere else outside of work, 3) in the case of car holes size may very well matter, and 4) the Girl may be right about the garage door opener deserving at least a little more attention.

But 5) don't you go telling her I said so.