Occasionally, the depth of my idiocy surprises even me.

It's hot today. Our house is air-conditioned in exactly two rooms: the kids' bedroom and the room we call the "family room": in its previous incarnation, it was a crudely screened-in lanai (patio). When we moved in, Ryan laid down some carpet and stuck a futon and a TV in it and all the kids' toys wound up in it and now it's kind of a multi-purpose hang-out room. The last vestige of the room's patio-ness is a lockable sliding glass door.

So it's hot and I have the air con running in the family room. I am crawling under the futon to remove the toys stuck herein in a vain attempt to organize and make sense of things. So I get the bright idea to close the sliding door. My reasoning was twofold: it would keep the boys trapped inside and it would make things cooler and easier to work in.

Zac, the quintessential three-year-old, doesn't like this arrangement. He decides to open the door and check out the options in the non-fun family gathering room. I admonish him and ask him to come inside. He comes back in and slams the door behind him.

A few minutes later, I realize that I need to pee. I start to swing the door open and

D'OH!

It's locked.

Zac jiggled the lock thingy while slamming the door shut.

And I am stuck.

Did I mention that Katie's at camp? And Ryan has night school? And Mom has a band booster meeting? I am stuck, with only the two boys near me. The only exit is the door that leads to the backyard, and it features a handy-dandy double deadbolt, which, coincidentally, is locked, too. There's a key to open it, but is it in this room? There, it seems, is the question.

in the i-tunes cart: three songs by the Carpenters

Yeah, I got out. I found the key, opened the back gate and went in the front door, but not before I made Ryan call all our neighbors to get them to rescue me.

How embarrassing. I locked myself inside a room of a house. Who does that?

Posted by: Mitchell at July 6, 2005 11:14 PM

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