Last night our side basement door mysteriously got too big for its frame. We're not talking the swollen effect of humidity, I mean by a quarter inch side-to-side it wouldn't close, when a few hours earlier it had been fine. The frame seemed completely tight and connected even though it had changed size.
I wondered if there had been another earthquake, and Allie worried whether the house had shifted so dramatically in an hour and it meant we shouldn't stay in it. Corrigan suggested this was beyond his physics knowledge, that it indicated a gap in the time-space continuum. We looked at the little foyer structure over the stairs and between 5 of us could not identify which dodgy details had always been there unnoticed until we got suspicious, and what might look different. (This was all after 10:30 at night so the light was against us.)
Then I thought, "Wonder if Andrew Cone's moving crew hauling random furniture in and out of our driveway where he'd "stored" it has anything to do with this?"
I called Ben and asked, did you hit the entryway alcove doorframe with a large piece of furniture, or, say, Andrew's truck?
There was silence.
"Because the door doesn't close anymore," I prodded.
"Um, yeah, there was something," Ben said. "When we couldn't start Andrew's truck, two of us were pushing it out of the driveway, and the drivers' side door was open and it hit the east side of the entryway. But that was only the strength of two people pushing."
And the weight of a truck, Allie pointed out when I relayed the news.
So I decided to take a piece of lumber and hold it against the east side of the door frame, and hit it with a sledgehammer. The frame jumped a bit. Several knocks later - probably much appreciated by sleeping neighbors - the door was able to close.
I was glad to have the seemingly instinctual knowledge to use a piece of lumber to distribute the power of the sledge hammer, and somewhat disconcerted that 1. our entryway can shift on its foundation like that 2. someone ran a car into the house and didn't check for damage. (I made Ben promise to change his policy next time.)
That's Haymarket: The house is out of square; was it an earthquake, or Andrew Cone?
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tales from life in a co-op
under our roof
a glassblowing alternajournalist, a musical storytelling anarcho-baptist, a capoeira-playing engineer, a renaissance physicist, a scrabble champion math teacher, a neurobiologist philosopher, a filmmaker documenting the deadliest man alive, an international flutist biologist, a journalist animator baker, a hiking biking banjo-strumming math teacher, a singing bilingual editing, a backgammon playing sex therapist, a novel-writing psych nurse guitarthlete, a pensive epistilary collage artist & two cats.