Grandchildren Are Precious

In my home, as in most, there is a room at the top of the stairs that in other parts of the world is referred to as “the necessary” or sometimes as the water-closet. My wife liked to refer to this as my “hidey-hole,” which I thought grossly unfair, but it is true that I sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time in there, showering, shaving, combing my hair, brushing my beard, and progressing ever so slowly through whatever book(s) I have in there at a given time.
I had a visitation this past Thursday from my youngest daughter, who brought her three sons (ages 4, 6, and 8) to visit while she dropped off her old laptop, which she was loaning me until I could get mine fixed. While she and I enjoyed a cup of hot chocolate in the kitchen, the boys first ransacked the toy bucket in the front room and then started running around upstairs, making frightful noises as they ran and jumped and slammed doors and harassed one another. She and I determined to ignore that, and eventually they were called down to have their own hot chocolate and then to ride off into the day, while I turned to the heady business of learning how to use an old laptop. All was well until the next morning, when I rolled out of bed and went to the necessary – or, rather, went to the hallway door that normally opened onto the necessary but on this day was not opening, because it was locked from the inside. My immediate conclusion was that this was attributable to Jacob Riley, the middle of her three sons, as he had been prone to indulge in turning the knob on door locks ever since he learned to walk, but in all truth I have to admit that it might just as well have been Benjamin Anndrew, the youngest, who tends to imitate his brothers in every way possible. Jacob had locked the downstairs bathroom door in the past, and also had locked me out of the house on at least two occasions. In the case of the downstairs bathroom, its lock has a keyhole, and I could open it with a paper clip or the small blade on my pocket knife, as I had to do many times while my own children were growing up and had locked themselves in; in the case of the outside door, I had had to break through the lock on the bulkhead door in order to get into the house one time, while another time I was able to open a window and crawl in.
I leaned over to look, confirming that there was no keyhole to pick, and then I fetched my pocket knife and a credit card to see if I could push back the latch as all the detectives do in the mystery novels I read. It turned out I have no such talent. I then got a larger sheet of stiff plastic, a butcher knife, and eventually a long strip of thin metal that had been removed from a bed spring long ago – all without success. The only way out (or in, in this case) appeared to be to smash a hole through the door, which would then have to be replaced, but I determined to wait a bit, thinking I might enlist the aid of a friend on the other side of the valley, who is a retired mechanical engineer and had a remarked talent for fixing things, and I went off to the gym to take a shower and to indulge in the make-busy things that make up my day.
I mentioned my predicament to my youngest when she phoned, and she asked if there were a little hole in the doorknob; I told her there was not.
One of the things for that day was a visit to the Community Development Department at Town Hall, where I had to look at some papers for upcoming Zoning Board of Adjustment cases, and I happened to mention my plight to the new Assistant Town Administrator, a former officer in the Salem Police Department, who asked if there were a little hole in the front of the doorknob, and I informed him there was not, as this was an old door. He suggested that I talk to the Fire Department about borrowing their door spreader. I had never heard of this device, but it seems that most fire departments have such a mechanism, which spreads the door frame sufficient to allow access to a lock, so that they can get through locked doors quickly, either to rescue people or to simply get access into locked areas. He acknowledged that using this tool sometimes cracks the adjoining wall, but my thinking was that, in the event that calamity happened, I could coerce the grandsons’ father into patching the wall, which is something he does rather well.
This condition continued through that day and night, and I found myself on Saturday morning at the Town Meeting Deliberative Session, where I was recording the minutes for the Town Clerk … and, it turned out, sitting directly across the aisle from the Fire Chief. I approached him during the intermission and made my problem known, asking how I could get ahold of that device to see if it would resolve my problem. I mean, I could keep showering at the gym, and even shaving there, but eventually JoanEllen would come down for a visit, and the door had to be open by then! Chief Murray was all pleasantness, clearly thinking my problem was a big joke; he asked if there were a little hole in the doorknob, and I assured him there was not. He then said he would speak to the on-duty captain after the meeting, and he suggested that I wait an hour or so and then call the Fire Station and ask for help.
I did that, and the captain told me he would be there in a few minutes (which meant, of course, that I had to dash about the house and do a little picking up). Sure enough, in much less than a quarter of an hour a fire truck was parked in front of the house (because my cars fill the bottom of the driveway, which was so icy that my vehicles could not get up the hill). I opened the kitchen door, to find not just the captain, but also three brawny firefighters, all dressed up in fire-fighting gear, and we all paraded through the kitchen and dining room and then up the stairs to the second floor. As the captain reached the top of the stairs, he proclaimed, “I could open this with a clothes hanger,” but he took out a credit card from his wallet. I told him I had already tried that, without success, and he informed me that he was pretty good at it … and he then stuck the card into the crack between the knob and the doorframe and opened the door, as fast as I could have opened it before it was locked!
I was appreciative, but embarrassed, and he then made it worse by pointing to the doorknob and saying, “See that little hole in the middle? You can just push the end of a clothes hanger in there and release the lock.” I bent over and looked again, and my eye apparently was working better than it had been Friday morning, because sure enough, there was a 3/16” hole in the middle of the doorknob!

Am I the only person in the world who did not know about this fail-safe lock-release in bathroom doors?

The Second Coming

This is the picture (or one of them) that I tried to put in yesterday's blog. This was the view outside my kitchen door all yesterday, when it snowed about approximately 26 hours. I did not leave the house all day. I must admit I am a bit puzzled, as the template used for photo posting suggested the text would be on the right of the picture.
Okay, I guess the answer to that is to move the cursor down and then type. The next issue will be whether I can access this in Word to edit the text, or whether the Word entry will have to come underneath it. The solution, if this works, was to use the Blog This! button in Picasa; that turned out to be a bit confusing, as it looked as if I had to create a new blog, which I did not want to do (defining blog here as the site, not the page or entry), but once I got through the sign-in process the Blogger program knew about and identified my blog site. Now let's see if this worked.
As one might have suspected, the answer is both "Yes" and "
No" -- the picture is there, but Word does not see it! Hey; I am three hours late for supper and I want to watch "24" so that I won't lose track of the story, so I am leaving this for another day (or hour).
And the hour has come later, with a couple edits and a complaint, as I seem to have lost one hour and maybe two out of the story already! Moreover, as a result of spending too much time on this, I am losing out on the work I should be doing, so I'll be off to do that now and save more for another post.

The Beginning

Because two of my grown-up children have been fooling around with blogs for a while, and because my new Office 2007 software claims to let me post blogs easily right out of the Word program, I thought I would spend a snowy afternoon setting up a blog account and learning how to use it. As always, there were problems. First, it turns out I already had a Blogger account, that I apparently created some forgotten time in the past. Getting over that hurdle, I updated my profile and then attempted to register the blog with Word 2007, which kept showing me a Help page that did not answer my questions. Word 2007 insists that I have to have a picture provider and directs me to provide the posting URL and the source URL; Blogger tells me I can post pictures and mentions no URLs. Word's answer to that is to tell me to select the "My blog provider" entry … except that I cannot find any such entry to select! Apparently this is not going to be easy.

I then decided to just insert a desired picture into the posting in Word and see if it would go up. That went through another bit of confusion, but I finally got a picture in the posting file, except that it was very much oversize. Recalling what I had to do to resize a picture to include it in an E-mail, I went through that same process … and got the same oversized picture.

 

Then I simply shrunk the picture by pulling its ends in toward the center—but I know in my heart of hearts that this is not a good approach, because the actual size of the picture (that is, the number of bits) remains the same, meaning that the size will be much to large to be on the Web, slowing everything down. At this point, however, the intent was simply to see if the picture gets included, so I persevered.

The result, however, was that the text got there fine (although it took me a while to find it, not only because I did not understand that I had to search out my own title but also because I kept getting distracted looking at other people's blogs) … but there was no picture (that's the space between the second and third paragraphs). I obviously need more time at the drawing board, but I am getting hungry, so I am going upstairs to eat. Eventually there will be pictures; that's my new New Year's resolution – along with committing myself to exercising every day before breakfast, going to the gym at least three times a week, and learning French and Spanish. Ciao.