It was an interesting weekend. My dad celebrated a birthday and my little sister announced that she was engaged.

But none of you want to read about those boring topics, am I right? You want to read all about the story of what happened when I locked my keys inside my house!

So, never wanting to disappoint, I’ll start today’s live blog with that story.

You’re welcome, people.

10:20 AM

There’s a mental checklist thing I do.

“Wallet, cellphone, keys.”

Before I leave my house, leave work, lock my car door, etc., I do my mental checklist thing. I even physically touch the items to confirm I have them. For example, when I think “wallet” my hand will feel my back pocket.

This ensures, usually, that I never go somewhere without those all-important items.

Usually.

On Saturday morning, I got dressed for the gym. I grabbed a bottle of water from my fridge, walked to my front door and did my mental checklist thing. Then I shut the door to my house (locking it from the inside) and walked to my car.

As my brain told my hand to unlock the car door, a sad reality set in. Those weren’t keys in my hand. It was a bottle of water. My keys were still inside the house.

For whatever reason, my caffeine-deprived brain interpreted having something in my hand (in this case a bottle of water) as having keys in my hand.

Translation: I was now locked outside.

And my spare house key was on my mom’s key chain, which was with her… Several hours away in Savannah… Celebrating my dad’s birthday.

Suddenly, visions of eating pine cones and drinking water from a nearby garden hose as I spent the entire weekend under a shaded tree in my yard danced in my head.

11:03 AM

“Why didn’t you just call a locksmith,” many of you are undoubtedly wondering.

Nope, Kevin don’t play that game. I got myself into this mess and I was going to get myself out of it. Thankfully, I remembered something from when I first moved into the place almost a year ago.

There was a window that wouldn’t lock. The “handyman” the property’s owners use was supposed to fix it before I moved in, but he had never gotten around to it.

His laziness and incompetence was my saving grace!

I walked around to the backyard.

The gate’s locked. Of course it was. I always keep it locked so that small children and hobos don’t try to swim in my pool.

With my keys inside the house, I had to hurdle the fence. Gosh, that was fun. Then I arrived to the window in question. This was going to be more difficult than I realized.

The bottom-edge of the window was about five-feet off the ground. Getting up was going to be tricky. Inside the window, directly to the right, was fireplace bricks. Getting down, and avoiding hitting my head on said bricks, was going to be tricky.

So, I opened the window. I tried to raise it as high as possibly could to give me as much room as possible. Then, much like a male gymnast has to do on the pommel horse, I placed my hands on the base of the window and lifted myself up.

My head and shoulders were now through the window. The rest of my body was hanging outside, off the ground. I looked down and saw the edges of fireplace bricks. Falling down, head first, would be a bad idea.

Having no choice, I had to let go of the window base with my hands. My full weight was now on the base, with the top half of my body inside the house and the lower half hanging outside. My hands now free, I tried to touch the inside floor. Success.

Now, I was in a weird push-up position. I had to get the lower-half of my body inside. Through a combination of walking forward with my hands and wiggling the lower half of my body, I got to where only my feet and ankles were still outside. Now it was time for the dismount.

Long story short, I was able to get inside without breaking the window or my skull. But I have a few nasty bruises for my effort.

On the upside, I didn’t have to pay any locksmiths.

1:45 PM

After getting back inside and grabbing my keys, I made my way to the gym. Once I got back home and showered, it dawned on me that if I could get inside the house via that window, it means others could as well.

So, obviously, I decided to look around my house and make sure I didn’t have a colony of hobos living anywhere.

I have three bedrooms, but only use one of them. The other two are empty, except for their closets which are filled with my excess clothes. So, since I was on hobo patrol, I checked each closet to see if any were living behind my shirts and pants.

There weren’t.

I had forgotten I had so many “old” clothes. They aren’t really old, mind you. Some of them have only been worn a couple times. However, it’s been 2005 or 2006 since I wore them. You see, back in ’05 and ’06 I was in what I call my “workout warrior” period. I went to the gym. A lot. And these were the clothes I purchased during that time.

You can probably surmise, without me even saying it, that I haven’t worn these clothes since then because I haven’t been able to fit into them since then.

Well, after making sure there weren’t any hobos hiding inside shirt sleeves and pant legs, I decided to try on some of the clothes. I hadn’t done this in quite a while, but in the past ten months I’ve been diligently working to, you know, get healthier and stuff. And in the past three months I’ve worked extra diligently.

Lo and behold, I can wear some of those clothes again. Not all of them, but some of them. What that tells me is I am roughly back to where I was, fitness wise, in October of 2005, when I first began working at my current place of employment. I can once again wear the clothes I wore when I first started working here.

So, that makes this week “vintage” clothes week in Kevland.  On Sunday, I wore the charcoal-gray Dockers I wore during my job interview. Today, I’m wearing the plaid Ralph Lauren shirt I wore my first day on the job. It’s the same shirt I’m wearing in the photo on the employee ID badge I wear around my neck every day at work.

Tomorrow? Who knows. Maybe I’ll wear those shoes for which I used to be infamous.

4:00 PM

Sunday afternoon, I went to the grocery store. Being a Sunday, I was dressed nice, of course. But with a closet of “new” clothes at my disposal, the clothes I had on this particular Sunday actually, you know, fit me.

Who would have thought there were so many upsides to shopping for groceries while wearing clothes that actually fit you?

Before, I had to stop every few moments to make sure my pants wouldn’t fall down. Now, I could walk without interruption. This cut my shopping time in half!

Before, I couldn’t bring my cell phone into the store with me because, since I keep it in my pants pocket, the extra weight of the phone would result in more frequent stops to ensure the aforementioned pants did not fall down. Now, I could have my cell phone on me and answer the numerous phone calls I receive every half minute (cough).

Before, grocery store employees looked at me suspiciously. This might have been because I was stopping every few steps to pull up my pants. Or it might have been because they suspected I had mugged a larger person in the parking lot, stolen his clothes, and came into the store. And in that scenario, if I’m capable of stealing a person’s clothes, I’m capable of stealing a box of cereal from them. And so, they kept a close eye on me.

Now, they don’t look at me suspiciously at all! In fact, even though I had nearly forty items in my grocery cart, the young lady who ran the “10 items or less” aisle asked me to come on down as I was walking by. Would she have done that for someone she suspected might be a shoplifter? Nope, of course not.

Hmmm. Unless she was putting into practice that “keep your enemies close” thing…

4:50 PM

Rereading this blog post, it dawned on me how incredibly boring and uninteresting it is.

This wasn’t so much a blog post as it was a story a grandfather tells his grandchildren that inevitably puts them to sleep.

So, I’ll make up for it tomorrow. I don’t know what it will be about, but it’ll be funny. And even if it’s not funny, hopefully it’ll at least be interesting.

And even if isn’t interesting, hopefully it won’t put all of you to sleep.

I aim high, folks.