I have a poor memory, and I write things down to remember them. Grocery lists, items to pick up at the hardware, next trip, and things like that. These lists are often lost, or I now suspect, altered before I get everything I need for a project, and another trip is required for that one last item. Well I finally discovered why this was so often the case. You see this all started a couple summers ago. I had just built a new garage. The city, in a misguided attempt to create an industrial park to attract businesses to a dying area forced the removal of an old house I owned next door. Of course I had been using the house for about 5 years for storage and had to clear out all the items I had been saving for future projects. I ended up selling quite a bit of electronic equipment and purchasing an eighteen foot box truck to store the rest in, until I could replace the building. I managed to build a rather large garage in it's place. And had moved the items I intended to keep, into it. Over the first few months I noticed things moving seemingly by themselves, actually I didn't realize it at first. I attributed things being in different places to my lack of a viable memory. I only realized it as I began to suspect there were other forces in action. I kept finding that there were small items in precarious positions, situations that if started into motion would involve larger items and cause rather catastrophic results. It was almost as if these "constructs" (their name for them) were planned and intended to create havoc, nothing was dangerous in itself, but the mess that was created when a couple of these "situations" were put into motion, was impressive. I began being very deliberate where I placed things I didn't want destroyed, carefully placing them where they would be protected from damage, only to find them the 'center piece' of the next colossal catastrophe.

Then one day I thought I saw something move, you know how it is, a shadowy shape just out of sight, or where it could have slipped around a corner in the garage. Often it's a stray cat or a chipmunk, in the garage because the door was open on a warm day, and closed while they were sleeping in a shady spot in the coolness of the back of the garage. Or they had slipped in to sleep on the warm engine on a cool night, occasionally they acquire short tails this way, anyway, that's the kind of movement I saw. The weird part was what I found when I investigated. In the dim light it looked like a squirrel in an action figure uniform! Sprawled out as if it had been hit by something, I got a shovel and put it in a 5 gallon bucket, and moved it out into the light, of the afternoon sun. This was the first garage gnome I ever really saw, unfortunately it wasn't the last, which brings me to the importance of getting this message out, They are not the harmless creatures you would like to imagine! We are fortunate they find little reason to interact with us, and seldom take an adversarial stance, but when you get on their "bad" side, well you'll see as I tell my story.

Basically, each chapter starts with the away messages I used while trying to contend with issues in the garage. As I gained the trust of, and spoke to more of the Garage Gnomes I have discovered the following information and present it as the best available information, I can only assume the truth of it based on the convergence of various stories told. This is due to the Garage Gnomes having no apparent form of writing.