Back! ... with a tale of (amusing) woe

I've been traveling - visiting family - but now I am back, curled up in my favorite chair with my computer and a glass of wine. And I have a story to tell you, the latest installment in the ongoing saga of one woman's failure to understand how doorknobs work.

I have this habit, apparently, of locking myself out of places. Cars. Hotel rooms. Houses. I did it so many times in our current house that we ended up changing the locks, because we used to have the kind where the doorknob can still turn on the inside if it's locked on the outside, and that was ... bad. My most spectacular door failure so far was probably locking myself out of my sister's house wearing nothing but my nightgown when it was 30F and she was working an overnight shift. (After numerous attempts to break into her house using improvised tools, I ended up getting into her unheated basement -- which has an outside entrance, one of those old cellar-type trapdoors like in The Wizard of Oz, but no way into the house -- and huddling under a pile of craft supplies until morning, while trying not to think about black widow spiders.)

( At least this time I was indoors. )