Locked Out

I have no pictures of this, because my camera was in the house, and we weren't.  We ran some errands this morning, and came home with about an hour before lunch.  Mimi adores being outside, so after running in the stuff from the store, including my purse with keys and phone, we hung out in the front yard for a while.  Mimi also adores trying to open doors.  She kept going up to the locked front door and trying to open it.  I told Mac to go inside and unlock it so Mimi could actually open it if she got lucky.  Mac was inside for a few minutes, and then finally came back.  By then, Mimi had lost interest, so we played for a little while more in the leaves.  I wanted to go inside to grab something, so I walked into the garage and went to turn the handle.  It was locked.  I stood there, dumbfounded.  Why is this door locked?!  Then I start thinking in my head, Mac had better have opened the front door.  So I marched around to it.  She hadn't.  The back door is locked, as per the usual, because Mimi can open it.  We are literally locked out of our house.  Short of breaking a window, we aren't getting in.  I very seriously considered (attempting) to kick the door in.  It's just a knob lock, not a dead bolt.  But then I thought that Brad would not be happy about having to replace the door frame, afterwards.  Then I considered using Brad's sledge hammer to bang the living daylights out of the door knob to see if I could manipulate the lock.  Decided against that because I worried that it wouldn't work or that it would forever jam the door locked.  

So we went to a neighbor's house, where we tried calling three (3!) different locksmiths.  The first two didn't even answer their phones, although their websites claimed 24/7 emergency service.  Right.  Finally, I got the third company to answer.  The tech called and said he'd be there in 20 minutes.  Okay.  So we head back home, and as we are waiting, a giant storm rolls in--dark dark clouds with rain coming down in sheets.  After about an hour (!) wait, the guy finally pulls up.  "Sorry, they gave me the wrong address."  After about 10 minutes of finagling, he got the door open.  And then proceeded to charge me $170.   And that's minus the $20 discount he gave me for being longer than the time he said.  Sigh. 

I think when Brad hears about this, he may wish I had just kicked in the door.