Saturday’s unplanned adventure
August 3rd, 2008 by ktula
Yesterday was another relatively busy Saturday since Mango has join the household. In the morning, Smelly and i had to brave the roundtrip traffic going across the lake to Redmond for Mango’s third training session. The traffic was especially bad because I-90 was shutdown between 1245 and 1500 for annual Seafair’s Blue Angels aerobatics display.
Mango - half dog and half plastic tunnel.
In today session, Diane continued to work on the “come” command. Mango was also subconsciously being trained not to travel too far away from us when he’s not on leash. Finally, Diane showed us how to train Mango for the “down” command.
After hurrying home to feed Mango his late lunch, we went to Pho Cyclo to meet up with Erich and his friend (damn it, i can’t remember her name!). They were very interested in checking out Mango so they followed us home. I gave my set of house keys to Smelly so that she could open the door for them while i take Mango out of his crate to pee. After playing with Mango for most of the afternoon, they left. Since i was pretty much out of TP - the last remaining roll of TP was about 80 percent used - Smelly and i went to the nearby Target to restock our TP supply. We spent no more than 10 minutes in Target as we wanted to hurry home to feed Mango.
Mango taking his afternoon nap.
On arrival home as i was getting out of the car, i reached into my pocket for my set of house keys. I then remembered that i had given my keys to Smelly. I was praying that my keys would be in her possession but i knew that Smelly does not normally carry any keys. Unfortunately, i was right. None of us had any house keys and we were officially locked out of the house! After calling one of my neighbors. who told me that the Primus lock on our door is almost impossible to be picked and that the only way to open the door would be for a locksmith to destroy it by drilling through the lock, i checked on my nearer neighbors to see if they have any other ideas.
Apparently, my nearer neighbor had this happened to her before. She gave me the contact number for the emergency locksmith service. The locksmith is supposed to have a master key for all our locks. I only managed to leave a message for the on call locksmith. While waiting for the on call locksmith to return my call, i was frantically trying to contact all the nearby locksmiths. I only managed to get hold of one of them and i was told that he would have to destroy the lock but the problem was that he did not have a replacement lock with him.
Finally, the on call locksmith returned my call. He told me that he lived in Marysville and that he would not be able to get to my place until at least 2130, more than 3 hours later. Smelly and i decided we could not wait that long since we are not supposed to leave Mango in his crate during the day for more than two hours and Mango was placed in his crate more than two hours ago. We then attempted to break the double-pane glass window on the door but those glass were freaking hard. After whacking on it a few times with a tire bolt wrench, there was nary a scratch on the damn thing.
I then crawled over the 7-ft fence and jumped into my backyard. On inspecting one of the side windows, i realized that it was actually opened! But that window is on the second floor of my house and it is probably about 15-ft from the ground. After a quick call to my friendly neighbor, i got myself a ladder and a box cutter. I extended the foldable ladder to its full length and leaned it against the side of the house. After climbing up the ladder, i cut open the screen and squeezed myself through the window. I was in! You cannot imagine my relief the moment i stepped into my bedroom from the window. One of the first things that we did after opening the door was to let Mango out of his crate. He probably was not aware of the things that we had to go through just to get him out of his crate!
Window with screen cut open.
Yesterday was not the first time that i had locked myself out of my house. The other time was probably three years ago. But it was the first time that both sets of keys were left in the house! This will not happen again.
mm
Says
This happened to me once when I was in Catania, Italy, in 1998. I walked out of the appt to see a visiting friend to the stairs and the door slammed shut behind me. I had no keys with me. I ended up squeezing through a small window 6ft off the ground to get to the roof, walked on roof tiles and jumped back into my balcony! Fortunately I was thin enough to squeeze through that small window. Otherwise it will be almost impossible to get anyone to help me as I do not speak Italian at that time…
Aug 7th, 2008 at 23:07