No Open Blockers

I turned 30 a few weeks ago. Ok, so it’s probably time I learned how to ride a bike.

The actual learning process itself was pretty uneventful. My wife and I went up to the parking lot of the community pool, I got on her bike, and just went. No catastrophic falls, no accidentally riding into oncoming traffic. Twenty minutes later we were at Dick’s buying me my own shiny bike.

I became addicted. I’ve gone riding every day since then, even if it was just 30 minutes at lunch. I’m happy to report that I haven’t fallen yet. Though after that much riding that quickly, I have to admit that my ass is killing me.

That isn’t to say it’s been without incident. My wife and I have been taking the baby for rides after work (she has a baby seat on her bike, I’m not daring enough to risk Leanne’s well being, just my own). Every time we go, I insist we leave the front door unlocked. That’s in addition to my wife leaving the garage door unlocked when she closes it. Call me paranoid.

Call me unlucky too. The one time I forget to leave the front door unlocked is the one time I accidentally locked the garage door when I closed it. Seven years of instinct in simultaneously closing and locking the door kicked in before I realized it. Half a second after I heard the click I realized what had happened. Then I cursed. Loudly.

It gets worse. Here we find the family locked out of the house, yet I could see the spare key. It was in the little box attached to our front door for when realtors come to show the house. There it hung a mere 4 inches below the lock itself, mocking me.

I thought back to a month ago when we put the house on the market. The realtor gave us an option…

“Do you guys want the fancy digital one that only realtors can unlock or a combination one that you guys could unlock as well?”

The geek in me smelled technology.

“We’ll take the digital one. We’ve been here seven years and haven’t locked ourselves out yet, why the hell would we need the combo lock?”

In addition to my keys, I also left my cell phone inside. So on top of everything else, I had to suffer the indignity of asking a neighbor to borrow his phone so I could call our realtor to come let me in. To make sure I fully paint the picture of how big of a douche I looked like, realize I was wearing one of those stupid looking bike helmets at the time.

So one 45 minute bike ride later, our realtor showed up to let us back into our own house. Any longer and I was about to carry out my carefully devised yet extraordinarily stupid plan to scale the outside deck to the second floor screen door into the kitchen which, by our estimates, had about a 66% chance that we left it unlocked.

Getting back to the actual bike riding, the timing of my new found skill is great. I was running out of new options for cardio at the gym. We had been looking for something to do outdoors as a family. And I had been looking into possible Python projects for the summer, and I already know of a really cool combination of the two.

So what did I learn from this whole experience? Apparently not much, since I once again declined when the realtor offered to swap out the digital key holder for the combination one (I don’t think she wanted to be called out here again the next time we do this). Mmm… the sweet smell of digital technology on my front door…