Escape!

This morning there were about half a dozen strangers in our house by 8:00, tearing apart the walls and ceiling. I slept through my alarms (yes, all seven) and woke up to the sounds of scraping and hammering and various kinds of power tools.  I put on appropriate-enough clothes to peek out into the hall and found myself sealed in by sheets of plastic taped over the door, ceiling to floor, with vague shapes of figures moving around outside.

I had a brief vision of me bursting through the plastic, bellowing like the Hulk, but thought better of it almost immediately.

So I needed to come up with some other way to escape from my own house.  Planning ahead, I grabbed my climbing gear* for work this evening and packed up my laptop and accoutrements and kicked the screen out of my bathroom window.

Since we moved in twenty years ago, there has been an emergency rope ladder coiled up behind my toilet in case of fire, break-in, heat-seeking missile, incoming meteorite, etc.  And now I have finally tested it!  It held my weight fine, though it did have twenty years of dust-and-dead-spider accumulation that made me cringe and make odd strangled "yick!" noises every few moments.

To start, actually getting out of the window (the sill is about mid-chest height) was tricky; I had to stand on the back of the toilet  and lean forward to put both hands on either side of the window frame, then nearly do the splits to stick one foot through so I could haul myself the rest of the way, turning around halfway through the process so I was actually facing the ladder on the way down.  All this, of course, carrying a massive backpack that barely fit through the window at all and probably maxed out the weight limit on the ladder.

In order to close the sliding-style window behind me again, I fashioned a sort of hook from a wire coat-hanger, attaching it around the inside frame and making a loop at the other end.  Once safely on the ground again, I found a broom handle from the garage and used it to lift and pull the rope ladder free, then used it again to catch the wire loop and pull the window nearly shut, though it took quite a bit of finagling and a good lot of swearing.  Then I glanced around, hoping no one was calling the police about my suspicious behavior, and stashed the ladder and broom handle in the garage.

I then spent the day feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.  Thankfully, when I got home from work at 8:00 at night I was able to enter the house through the front door.  I think trying to reverse the whole going-through-the-window process in the dark would have been asking a lot from my already strained good luck.  

So now we have a two-story house with no way to move from one floor to the other without going outside and around the house, and half the time I can't get in or out of my room without about five minutes' ridiculous effort.

It's going to be a trying two months.

*Only now am I realizing that I even had my old rope in the closet; I totally could have rappelled down the side of my house!  Damn it!**

**I'm going to have to try this now.  Expect a post soon, entitled something like, "Should Have Seen This Hospital Visit Coming."