It Finally Happened

Let me tell you about the doors in my house, they are the typical Mexican doors that you will find in most of the homes here. They have no door knobs on the outside, just a keyhole. On the inside there is just a latch. So, as soon as you close the door it is always locked. I have two of these doors, one is my front door on top of the stairs and the other is the door that leads to the roof which is my fine dining room. When I first moved in I quickly made note of the fact that if I was on the roof and the wind slammed the door shut I would be locked out of my house and be stuck up on the roof. So I put a plan in place, whenever I would go into my dining room (on the roof) I would open the window in the door (the doors have a shutter window in them) so that if the door would slam shut I could reach my hand through the window and pull the latch, Such a clever plan. Today I forgot a step in the plan, because I only stepped into the dining room for 3 seconds to get something I didn’t open the window first. I tell it was a horrifying sound when that door slammed shut behind me. I was stranded on my roof...yep. I did have some options to consider though so I was not totally without hope, 3 of them to be exact. I was pretty sure I had left my front open when I came in, so all I needed to do was get off the roof and come back in through my front door. 2 ways to do that, one....jump off the roof, it isn’t very high but I was afraid of breaking an angle since I do have very weak angles. Option two would be to shimmy along side the edge of the roof, possibly 10 – 12 inches wide and I would loose about 3 inches where the windows are although by the windows I would have the bars to hang onto, the rest of the way I would just be hugging the wall. This is how the cats get up on roof, and get into my garbage; I call it the cat walk. Or there is option three, get the attention of someone walking by and ask them to walk up the stairs and walk in my front door (which I am still assuming is open) and open the door from the inside, this would of course all have to be done in Spanish which I was pretty confident I could do. I knew Senor Papa would not be by as he had already been here this morning, sometimes he comes more than once or at least he drives by sometimes but that would of course not happen today. So I weight my options and right away cross off jumping off the roof and decide that the whole Island doesn’t need to know how foolish I am (so I post this on the internet for the whole world to read instead) so I opt to shimmy along the catwalk which really wasn’t as scary as I had thought, it was rather easy, and sure enough the front door was open...what a relieve. Lesson learned is to always stick to the plan and put a backup plan in place, which is to get a rock to put in front of the door from now on. Just never a boring day here on the Island.