There are some moments in life during which you can’t help but think, “Is this seriously happening to me?” I had one of those moments yesterday. I had just gotten home from work and I had a productive evening all lined up: house cleaning, exercising, other menial yet necessary tasks… Anyway, Lady, our Labrador, had her Husky friends over to play in the back yard while I was at work yesterday. In the usual fashion, the dogs managed to remove one of their collars, and this time, it was Lady’s turn to be nude. So after AJ picked up the Huskies, I let Lady into the house and I went to the backyard to retrieve her collar.
Much like an idiot, I closed the door behind me, completely forgetting that we did not yet have door knobs on our newly installed French doors. Now, usually we utilize a little ghetto-ingenuity to open the door by sticking a flat head screwdriver into the internal door hardware, and rotating the screwdriver, using it as a door handle. I didn’t take a screwdriver with me into the back yard (I mean really, why would I need a screwdriver for that task?). So with collar in hand and no screwdriver to reenter the house, I began my resourceful thinking.
First, I looked for any sort of tool that might have been accidentally left in the backyard. No such luck. Then I searched for a small piece of wood I could use in the same manner I had been using the screwdriver. I found one and carefully poked it into the square hole and turned. This caused the wood to disintegrate in my hand. Okay… next idea… Maybe the side door was accidentally left unlocked. I walked over and turned the door knob. Dang it! No.
It is imperative for you to understand that we currently have no working gate to our back yard. One was broken and made Lady a flight risk, so Nathan screwed it shut. The other side is a brand new fence, and the addition of a gate is on the to-do list, but has not been installed yet.
At this point I was running out of options. As somewhat of a last resort, I decided to climb our 6 foot wooden fence. Barefooted. I was teetering at the top, trying to position one of our city issued garbage collection blue plastic dumpsters on the other side of the fence so I could step on it to get down without overturning it and necessitating an emergency trip to the hospital—impaling the back of my neck with untreated pine dog-eared fence picket did not seem like an enjoyable outcome to me. I couldn’t just jump down because I feared the rocks and sticks on the ground 6 feet below would not have been kind to my bare feet, and the concrete sidewalk didn’t look any more inviting.
As I was putting my right foot on the top of a Big Blue, I heard from the neighbor’s front yard, “Uhhhh, do you need some help?” I then proceeded to tell him the story about the door and the screwdriver and the tragic lack of gates. Then, I climbed down from my perch and in a pitiful and slightly embarrassed voice, I said, “Do you have a flathead screwdriver I can borrow?”
The end.
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