Well… first off, I’m back from my most excellent trip to Philly to watch first and second round action from the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. This year’s games were great, and it’s always nice to get away from the grind for a few days. It always butts up against UMBC’s Spring Break, so I get a couple extra days off afterwards to boot. And, this year I have tickets for third and fourth-round games in DC, with the overall winner going to the Final Four. That’s coming up this weekend. Oh, and it’s t-minus 9 days and counting until the official due date for our second rugrat. My pulse quickens as I type (in spite of the beta blockers).

Anyhow, this evening our garage door opener decided to go on the fritz. We were all sitting around in the dining room twiddling our thumbs, when the garage door decided to open all by itself! Always fun. I went and checked it out. The remote receiver module is a separate unit, and as I fiddled with it, the opener tripped a few times. I could hear a relay clicking somewhere each time it tripped. Shrugged my shoulders, went back inside, closed the garage door. Halfway through closing, it stopped. Tried again, it closed this time. An hour or so later, it opened itself again, and stopped midway. Seems that it’s become sensitive to vibration or something. I unscrewed the receiver from the unit and pulled it off. It’s a nice, cheapo, made-in-China piece of garbage just like everything else these days. With the receiver off, so far, it hasn’t acted up. So I’m tempted to blame the receiver. First, though, I’ll try reattaching it and changing the code, just to see what happens. If my suspicions are confirmed, and the receiver is bad, I’ll look into getting some keyfobs for our alarm system, and programming them to work the opener.

Nice that it decided to do this while we were home and around, rather than away with the alarm set, etc..