Friday, October 17, 2008

At Least I Got Some Exercise In

Today did not have an auspicious beginning. I slipped on my pants at the end of getting dressed and realized that I had left my keys in the jeans I had worn yesterday afternoon. Those pants were out in the living room, so I walked out to the front of the house to get breakfast and the keys and ended up being distracted by K (who was running late and left me to get E's stuff together for daycare) and E (who was a little needy this morning) and by the weight of my wallet in my front right pocket. After getting E shod, my belly filled, E's milk into a Thermos, and my lunch and water into my messenger bag, the kid and I shuffled out the door and into the car. After E was strapped into his carseat, I sat down in the driver's seat, pushed the power button and the dashboard flashed the no key light at me.

Damn, I'd just locked myself out of the house.

This surprisingly doesn't happen that often to me. If I'm wearing pants, my wallet and keys are in my pockets. I feel a little naked when my front pants pockets are empty and since the keys and wallet are usually together in the pants I wore the previous day, I rarely just forget the one.

Unfortunately, K sent me out to my parents' house to get the pin cushion so she could finish working on her poodle skirt costume. I didn't feel like wearing my work clothes over there, so I pulled on a pair of jeans, and since I was only going less than a mile down a dirt road to get to my parents' house, I didn't bother transferring the wallet from slacks to denim.

Bad idea.

I ended up testing the front door to see how sturdy it was. A lot of the doors in our house no longer fit perfectly into their frames and can be cajoled to open without turning the knob. Unfortunately, the external doors aren't among those flawed enough to open when they aren't supposed to. I didn't want to risk dislocating my shoulder or spending the time or money to fix the lock by trying to shoulder my way through the door, so I stood in the porch staring blankly into the utility room at my beer fridge (a room outside of the rest of the house) trying to figure out what I should do next. I haven't locked myself out of the house since I was living with K in an apartment a quarter mile from her school just months after we married more than six years ago. That time I was just able to walk to her classroom and get her key to go and open the door, although it was August and there were no sidewalks and I wasn't wearing shoes, so the blacktop scalded my feet when I couldn't walk on the grass next to the road. This time, the school is seven miles away and the only way to get there would have been to push E in a cheap umbrella stroller the whole way along the side of a four-lane highway.

Then I remembered that my sister and her boyfriend had driven in last night to pick up some furniture she'd been storing at my parents' house to move into the house she just bought. I thought maybe my parents had a spare key to my house hanging on their key rack next to their door and Courtney (not the blogger) and Sam could let me in. The worst case scenario is that they'd have to drive E and me into town and the kid would have to ride the old-fashioned way in someone's lap. Actually the worst-case scenario was that they had gone off somewhere, but being as early as it was, it was more likely that they were still asleep.

So, I set off when E in that crappy stroller and walked the mile down the dirt road to my parents' house to find out that not only were my sister and her boyfriend there, but my dad had taken the morning off of work to help them start loading the truck. The spare key was right there on his key ring, so he drove me home, let me in the house so I could get my keys and I loaded E back into the car (now screaming because he didn't want to leave his granddaddy). I was only about an hour late for work. Luckily I have planning first thing and don't have any kids until 10 a.m. Unfortunately, I didn't miss the stupid department meeting. I got there just in time to be called in for that.

I don't usually like to use cliches, but I really am happy that today is Friday.

1 comment:

Julie said...

Loving Friday for the coming weekend is not a cliche.

I have the constant fear of locking myself out of the house. I will try not to let this exacerbate my fears.