Pride Goeth Before a Fall

Or, to be more accurate, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before the fall" (proverbs 16:18).  I know this from the internet, not from any personal bible study, as by and large I am a good old-fashioned heathen, which is to say that I am successfully not forcibly converted by any major religion.

Anyway, the point is that we have a new library, and it is large and pretty and a nice place to sit and work, although all the chairs near electrical outlets are uncomfortable as hell.  And for the life of me, I can't figure out how this library is organized.  The Dewey decimal system is a wonderful thing, but when you can't find an entire genre of books (say, for example, the mysteries are suspiciously and delightfully ironically missing) the reference number isn't going to do you much good.

This library is a two-story building, so I spent a lot of time going up and down the stairs in search of the book I wanted, as it never seemed to be on the floor I was on at the time.  Unfortunately, the stairs are that type of almost purposefully unkind proportions, where they are a little bit too deep and the risers are a little bit too short and it makes climbing them a very awkward process that requires almost too much concentration.

Now all of this would be a moot point if I had just asked the nice women at the information desk for help, because they could have told me that the mysteries were upstairs behind the tall magazine racks that I thought went on forever.  But pride, or at least embarrassment at not being able to figure this out on my own, kept me from asking.  So my visit to the library was easily four times the length it should have been, and by the time I found the book in question I was both annoyed and relieved and the combination was enough to keep me from concentrating properly on the stairs.

So I fell.  After two steps, I misjudged the distance in the whole depth-to-height ratio and got that jarring feeling when you expect the ground to be a little bit farther away than it actually is, and my other foot failed to find the next step at all.  Down I slid, my years of experience in falling allowing me to avoid going ass-over-teakettle by just leaning back and riding the stairs like an incredibly painful and jagged slide.  Thankfully, at the half-way point there was a small landing and I managed to catch my feet under me and stand up again, taking the second half of the stairs nonchalantly, trying to play it cool and hoping no one had noticed.

Pretty much everyone had noticed.

I walked red-faced to the front desk and, to add insult to injury, discovered I had no cash to pay off a fine from many many years ago that prohibited me from actually checking out the book I had gone through so much trouble to find.  

I haven't been back yet.

Escape!

This morning there were about half a dozen strangers in our house by 8:00, tearing apart the walls and ceiling. I slept through my alarms (yes, all seven) and woke up to the sounds of scraping and hammering and various kinds of power tools.  I put on appropriate-enough clothes to peek out into the hall and found myself sealed in by sheets of plastic taped over the door, ceiling to floor, with vague shapes of figures moving around outside.

I had a brief vision of me bursting through the plastic, bellowing like the Hulk, but thought better of it almost immediately.

So I needed to come up with some other way to escape from my own house.  Planning ahead, I grabbed my climbing gear* for work this evening and packed up my laptop and accoutrements and kicked the screen out of my bathroom window.

Since we moved in twenty years ago, there has been an emergency rope ladder coiled up behind my toilet in case of fire, break-in, heat-seeking missile, incoming meteorite, etc.  And now I have finally tested it!  It held my weight fine, though it did have twenty years of dust-and-dead-spider accumulation that made me cringe and make odd strangled "yick!" noises every few moments.

To start, actually getting out of the window (the sill is about mid-chest height) was tricky; I had to stand on the back of the toilet  and lean forward to put both hands on either side of the window frame, then nearly do the splits to stick one foot through so I could haul myself the rest of the way, turning around halfway through the process so I was actually facing the ladder on the way down.  All this, of course, carrying a massive backpack that barely fit through the window at all and probably maxed out the weight limit on the ladder.

In order to close the sliding-style window behind me again, I fashioned a sort of hook from a wire coat-hanger, attaching it around the inside frame and making a loop at the other end.  Once safely on the ground again, I found a broom handle from the garage and used it to lift and pull the rope ladder free, then used it again to catch the wire loop and pull the window nearly shut, though it took quite a bit of finagling and a good lot of swearing.  Then I glanced around, hoping no one was calling the police about my suspicious behavior, and stashed the ladder and broom handle in the garage.

I then spent the day feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.  Thankfully, when I got home from work at 8:00 at night I was able to enter the house through the front door.  I think trying to reverse the whole going-through-the-window process in the dark would have been asking a lot from my already strained good luck.  

So now we have a two-story house with no way to move from one floor to the other without going outside and around the house, and half the time I can't get in or out of my room without about five minutes' ridiculous effort.

It's going to be a trying two months.

*Only now am I realizing that I even had my old rope in the closet; I totally could have rappelled down the side of my house!  Damn it!**

**I'm going to have to try this now.  Expect a post soon, entitled something like, "Should Have Seen This Hospital Visit Coming."