Time for Some Thrilling Heroics

I have only ever locked my keys in the car twice. The first time I was at school, so I just called my dad and he came over and unlocked the car for me. This is the story of the second time, which was two days ago.

I was heading home from school and had stopped to get cat food on the way home and I was hungry (nothing to do with the cat food! I just hadn't had time for lunch and it was, like, 4pm!) and since I was on my own for the weekend, I thought I'd just stop somewhere and get something on the way home. But what? I just could not decide on anything and as I was driving home I was getting increasingly frustrated with my own indecisiveness. So I finally decided to just go home, drop off my stuff, then decide on dinner based on whatever coupons were around. Well, I got home and got my stuff out of the car, but in the process of doing so I dropped them on the driver's seat. Which I didn't realize until I got to the door.

Now, we do actually have a hidden spare, but I couldn't find it (the house is super disorganized because we're remodeling the kitchen). And of course my cell phone was in my purse, inside the house so that was no good. Next I went to the front of the house to see if there was a way to get in there, but the door and windows were locked. Sigh.

This might be a good time to mention that in addition to being super hungry, I also kind of had to pee.

I went back to the back door and considered my options: 1) I could walk 5 blocks to my sister's house, where she presumably would be home and in possession of a spare key. 2) I could break the window on the back door, which would be kind of silly and I'd probably just hurt myself. 3) If only there were a way to get to the second floor roof, because I almost never lock the door to the deck up there.

So it was down to options 1 and 3. I should take this time to explain that there is a deck on the second floor, off of my bedroom. There's some space around the deck and I have had to go out on the roof occasionally and I have often though that if there were a way to get to the ground from the roof then that would be a convenient way to escape in an emergency. Hang on, I'm going to try to sort of sketch this out for you here:

__________

../..... /.\

/....../... \

Okay, so there's a little peak roof over the entryway, the sloped roof over the tiny attached garage, and the flat roof with the deck on it.

So, basically I'm contemplating the roof, and trying to figure out if there's a way to get up on the roof over the entryway. Because, really it'd be faster than walking over to Ann's. But I'm not seeing anything, so I'm about to start walking, when I see a ladder at the back of the backyard. And it's gross. It's covered in cobwebs and I hate spiders so much, it's not even funny. But there are also rakes back there, so I rake all the crap off this ladder and it's a big aluminum sucker that weighs a frickin' ton, but somehow I wrangled it over to the house and got it next to the entryway.

Then, while being actively stabbed in the ass by a thistle plant, I climbed the ladder, got onto the small roof, successfully evaded the wisteria vines that tried to entangle me, climbed up to the flat roof, over the railing, into the screened area, and into my closet. Success!

Of course I was totally covered in dirt, leaves, and sweat and the cats were totally freaked out by my coming in that way, but it was a hugely successful endeavor. And I felt like a total bad ass! Which is always cool.

In the end I found a spare house key (in the house, naturally), but had to wait for my dad to come home the next day to get my keys out of the car.

I ended up ordering pizza that night.