When You Lock Yourself Out of Your House at 6:30am

I’m not a morning person. I’ve never made any claims to the contrary. It takes me a while before my brain is fully functional each morning. It’s not unheard of for me to forget my lunch at home, or forget my computer even. (Which is a great reason to live not too terribly far from my workplace.)

But this morning, I forgot my car keys.

Typically, that wouldn’t be a problem. You just go back inside and get the keys, and all is well. Except I’d already closed the garage door when I realized this, and my car keys are with my house keys. Also, we have no front door right now, since we’re working on building a new staircase to the front door. So basically, I discovered myself locked out of my house at 6:30am.

The whole family was asleep. I didn’t want to wake the kids up, so calling the home phone was a bad idea. I tried calling Denisa on her cell, but it was in quiet mode. (6:30am, remember?) It didn’t ring. Our bedroom is on the second floor, so after some thinking, I decided to go with the old “throw rocks at the window until the girl comes” approach. It works in all the movies, right?

Step one: find small enough rocks. It’s dark that early in Maine right now, so that wasn’t quite as simple as it would seem. How many rocks would I need? I got five.

Step two: throw the rocks. Our bedroom windows are particularly high, so I had to really chuck those rocks to get them to hit the window. Also, there are screens on the lower half of them, which muffle the rock noises. Of my five rocks, only 2 actually made contact with the glass. But they made a satisfying plinking noise.

Step three: wait. I waited to have Denisa come to the window. I waited some more. No dice.

Step four: repeat step one and two and three until Denisa shows up. The good news is that I got a lot of practice throwing rocks. Of course, cars kept driving by, and I felt like an idiot standing in front of his house throwing rocks at it, but maybe it was too dark for them to see me. I think I threw about another 10-15 rocks.

Step five: since Denisa still hasn’t shown up, try calling her again. I got out my phone and noticed she had sent me a text! Exciting! It was a simple question: Is it hailing outside?

Step six: text your wife that no, it isn’t hailing. I’m locked out of the house, and would you come open the garage door?

Step seven: wait. Surely she’ll see that text soon.

Step eight: repeat steps one, two, and three. Begin to ponder whether waking up the rest of the family would be so bad or not. Just when you’re getting ready to do it (after 12 minutes of rock throwing) . . .

Step nine: Denisa shows up at the window!

Success. I got my keys and got to work, and I can now say I’ve personally done the “throw rocks at the window” schtick from the movies. Not quite as romantic in real life as it is on the silver screen.

Maybe that’s just because it was below freezing.

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