A Bit of a Jam

It turns out that these last few evenings have been very busy for me because I have a meeting with my boss (or old boss, I guess) Doug tomorrow to review a bunch of schedules for a meeting next week. Whew, that was a long sentence. Anyway, I'm hoping to do a post tomorrow night but at least wanted to share this incident that happened to me today.

We have a dog door that is a panel inserted into our sliding back door. It goes out onto a little screened-in porch. In order to keep the door from sliding open (since it can't be locked), we keep a sturdy pole in the track jammed against the door. So just before lunch today, I decide that I'm going to go out and pick up some dog droppings (e.g., poop) off the porch. I notice that the pole is barely in the track and I think to myself that Duncan must not have put it back all the way the last time. This frustrates me a little. Anyway, I'm able to open the door without even moving the pole. So out I go and I close the door behind me so Calleigh can't follow me. I scrape up the poop in the dust pan and turn to come back inside. I try to open the door and find that it won't budge. The pole has dropped back into place rendering it impossible for me to open the door (glad to know it works!). There's Calleigh on the other side of the glass peering out at me. What to do??? I feel like one of those parents who locks there kid in the car with the keys and tries to get the kid to open the door. In this case, I start trying to give Calleigh instructions on how to pull up the pole. But it's pretty jammed in there and I don't even think she could get it up if she tried long enough. As it turns out, she only tries for about 10 seconds until she starts thinking I'm playing a game of tapping on the glass and she starts laughing and tapping the glass back to me. Clearly, this plan wasn't going to work. My next thought is that maybe I could get in through the doggie door but with my bulging belly, this thought quickly vanishes. I'm picturing getting stuck in there yelling for help at the top of my lungs. My next thought was that maybe Calleigh could get my cell phone but it was in my black bag sitting on top of the table. Maybe she could pull the bag over. So I start giving her instructions on that. But she wasn't cooperating with that either. Now, the good thing in all this was that I wasn't in a complete panic or anything because I knew that I could tell Calleigh to just crawl through the doggie door and she would be outside with me. But I figured she would be more help on the inside. Just when I thought I might need to have her come out and go find a neighbor's phone to use, I remembered that I left the door from the garage to the inside open because I had grabbed the dustpan out of the garage. So I ran around to the front, punched in the garage code, and voila, I was inside. All in all, it was about 5 minutes but my blood was rushing just a little! Of course, Calleigh thought it was fun and games the whole time!