De-arming the Door

We have a side garage door.  When we built our house we had the standard car-facing big doors and then a human-sized door on the side of the garage.   The alarm company people looped it in with the other windows and doors in the house and all was “protected”.   Or so it would seem.

The garage doors we put on a keypad, so anyone who needed to get into the garage area of the house we’d give the code to.   Someone wanting to borrow the power washer, friends dropping off something while we weren’t at home or our next-door-neighbor needing a place to temporarily store the latest pinball machine he’d bought.   Those among other reasons would be cause for sharing the code to the garage…only there was a catch:

Only open the garage doors.  Don’t open the side door, even though it’s right there and the garage doors are open and it doesn’t look like it could do any harm—because it will set off the house alarm.  

Simple enough, and yet it would happen.   Mostly it would happen to us, when we came home.   I set it off yesterday without thinking.   I drove into the garage and had noticed Whitaker ringing the doorbell to see if my children could come out to play.  I exited my car door and opened the side garage door to walk to the front door—because it was right there.  

I told Whitaker the children would be home in an hour and then I heard klaxon’s going off from inside the house.   We get caught off guard by this because opening the side garage door is silent and doesn’t let you know you’ve triggered the alarm unless you’re inside the house and hear it doing that counting down beeping.   And then you look stupid when you set off your own alarm.

So why did we have the door armed?   We weren’t sure.   But we kept doing the arming thing for almost eight years now.   And get this: we even added a third car garage, moving the door to an entirely different spot in the garage, moving the wiring and still having it as part of the circuit.  

I would guess of all the times the alarm has been tripped at our house, none of which were actual burglary situations, ninety percent were accidents because of that door.   And I’d had enough.  

I called the alarm company and today a technician came out and changed the panel so that the door isn’t included in the circuit anymore.   Ten minutes.   Ten minutes was all it took to change the system.   Why is it we’re blinded to some things because that’s how they’ve always been?

The Big Boy Update:  Some people see shapes in clouds.   My son and I were on the porch in a rain storm the other night.   The wind was whipping the trees around.   My son told me, “the branches look like waves of water.   Sometimes if I look in the trees I see a horse’s head.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   I’ll have to go into the latest advice we got from my daughter’s play therapist in a day or two; I’m still processing it.   My daughter made up a song today called, “Laser Eyes” with her music therapist.   She asked if we could all come upstairs so her father, brother and I came to listen to the song.   She’s starting to process being blind and just beginning to speak about it.