Back in her blogging days, my friend Ali was known as Lady Mac. Long-time readers remember her. That was actually how we met…through blogging. She’d stumbled across my blog somehow back in the Fall of ‘04 and thought I’d be the perfect person to help her with some of the special technical nuances of Wordpress. We became fast friends and although we don’t see each other as much as I’d like anymore…because, well…she’s managed to find a life…I consider her to be a close friend.
How close? Well, she helped me down more than one bottle of wine while Capt. UberHusband was in Iraq. She loves my doggies. More important, they love her. Cookie adores her Aunt Ali. She’s like the big sister I never had. We’re so close that after lunch at PF Chang’s today, she came home and promptly locked herself, me, and the dogs out of the house. For forty minutes. In the 98-degree heat.
It was quite a sight…a 30-ish woman and a slightly-older-than-30-ish woman standing on a back patio with two befuddled dogs, trying to figure out how to get back in. We don’t have a key hidden anywhere because in the seven years we’ve lived in this house, we’ve never needed one. So, Ali tried to pick our brand-new lock with her earring. I would have been really scared had that worked. Then we grabbed barbecue tools and tried to break one of the glass panes in the back door. No dice.
CU is on the road, on the way back home from Tulsa. If any of our neighbors had been home, I couldn’t have called him anyway because I haven’t committed his new cell number to memory yet. At that point, he was about two hours from home but as I found out after the fact, didn’t have a key, either. In all honesty, we did have one neighbor at home…but it was Demon Spawn’s house. Going there is an absolute last resort.
So then…we started going around the house to see if any windows were unlocked. We have a couple which are really stubborn, so I figured we might be able to open one of those as I had likely given up and left it unlocked. Nope. We work our way around the house…it’s great fun to have 894 windows…and wind back up on the patio, where we find an unlocked window. Directly next to the back door. Of course.
Ali pulls off the screen, we get the window up and she climbs through, unlocking the door so we can receive our air-conditioned salvation. Now I know how Cookie felt when I accidentally left her outside for a couple of hours earlier this month. All is well now…it’s taken me longer to re-acclimate than the dogs, which just goes to show what a wuss I’ve become.
And needless to say, we will now be hiding a key somewhere outside…in case Ali ever comes back over.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
We have a couple of those stubborn windows too, and when I was locked out a few days ago, wouldn’t you know it! Mike had gone through and locked them all properly (because unlike me, HE doesn’t give up!). But of course, all I had to do was walk down the street to the BBQ he was still at (I had run home to grab something) and get the keys.
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June 30th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Oh, that sounds like somethng that would happen to me. All of my spare keys are sitting in the key bowl on my entry table. A lot of help that will do, right?
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