I have company coming soon. I should be cleaning. No sense peaking too soon, me thinks, lest I just have to clean another day. I did, however, put little piles of stuff away, like the stack of photo CDs and the remains of miscellaneous items, stands, signs, etc., from the Shrimp Fest the first weekend of the month. Oh, and the important papers that belong in their safe place. That's when the garage door broke.
Our remedy? Bruce and I decided to use our front door keys. Yup. That sounds like a great plan until you see my key ring. Bruce had locked his inside the house and we were forced to rely upon mine. Refer to the photo below. The large bracelet of keys and discount store tags - "That's mine," she says proudly. I take it everywhere and love it because it fits over my right hand and, to my astonishment, my left hand, too, and I never lose it! Well, that's the good news. The not so good news is that it takes three keys to open our front door. Time and salt air have caused us to replace the locks and at different times, thus resulting in three different door locks. Since we usually get into the house by way of the now broken garage door, there I was, in the rain, trying out every one of the keys on my ring in the locks on the door. You might wonder why I have so many keys on my huge ring. Once upon a time I needed them. As I got more over the years, I neglected to toss the old and now I am unsure of which goes to what. I'm afraid to throw any away because I will need one or the other immediately when I do. You know it's true.
Happily we have Next Door Maggie, our wonderful neighbor who has keys to our Stately Martha Manor. (We live with Martha Bear®, a stuffed ursine, and the cats and dogs in Stately Martha Manor .www.MarthaBear.com. She tells all about it in her free family-friendly teddy bear short stories. #7 is my favorite- The Great Amelia Island Sniff-Off.) So Next Door Maggie loaned our own keys to us for entrance and then immediately retrieved them because she is a responsible human being. Once inside, I gathered all the keys hanging on the handmade wooden key with hooks. May I say, not enough hooks because keys are double and triple stacked on those hooks. Again, refer to the photo below and see some of the keys. Mix and match, match and mix- it took the better part of an hour to figure out that I, indeed, had all three front door keys on key bracelet, after all! I also discovered a few keys to our daughter's house who claims she gives us her front door key every time she we visit her. She's right! I could continue but you might be feeling the same way Bruce was when he said, "Let me out of this loony bin-- I have to go have more keys made." (His purpose was to have a couple extra full sets of front door keys. He's too organized.) Of course, this last loony bin crack came about when he was looking for the Red Box movie to return it. Having located on the gramophone by the front door, he said, "I found it." Then he said to me, "Once I find something, you don't need to keep looking for it." I'll have to remember that part.
