Refer To The Manual As A Last Resort

Above is a schematic of the garage door opener where maybe you can see where the chain comes around the sprocket. And if you are not careful, the chain comes around your thumb AND the sprocket. To the left, from the owner's manual, is the warning that says, "To avoid possible serious injury to fingers from moving garage door opener: ALWAYS keep hand clear of sprocket while operating opener /securely attach sprocket cover BEFORE operating." Oops! In my own defense, the garage door was not operating when my thumb got pinched - I was trying to free up the chain. The thumb was looking gross today but not infected. I actually rubbed some Orajel on it because that stuff is mostly Benzocaine which helped. I changed the dressing a few times and kept the Neosporin on it too.

I went to the mall today to exchange the iPod Lucie bought for church - the HOLD button never worked on it. They swapped it out with no problem. The kids were off from school AGAIN today (by the way, the official snow measure was a whopping FOUR inches!! ha ha) so we thought we would eat in the food court at the mall. However, the Chinese food place and Arby's were closed due to some big construction going on. We went from there to Sears and got the replacement garage door opener on sale. The motor was exactly the same so Elliott helped me unbolt the old one and slap up the new one. I could clearly see where the chain drive mechanism was worn out on the old one. The new one works great. It came with a new security function though so my old remote controls wouldn't work. It came with one so Lucie can have that and I was able to program my built in car remote so we are functional. I will get some remotes from eBay. To program my car remote, I had to push two buttons in the car, run into the garage and up on a ladder, press a button on the door opener motor, and then run back to the car and push another button. I have three buttons to program in the car so I had to make a few trips. I felt like running an obstacle course. Then I erased all of the codes and had to do it all again!

The rest of the evening we spent catching up with 24 and Idol. Pretty low key which was fine.