As you are well aware, Chaz was away for 10 days last week and the week before. For the first seven days, I was fine being by myself at home. We live in a small town away from anywhere remotely dangerous, so I had nothing to worry about. However. That all changed on the seventh day. The Sabbath of Chazlessness, you might say.

I spent the morning Skyping with Chaz, cleaning the house, and getting ready for the day. Friends were coming over for dinner in the evening, so I was rushing around getting everything ready for that. Eventually, I had to leave the house to go to a baby's first birthday party (loads of fun! good apple crisp! wonderful people!) and I departed through the door that goes out to our garage. Important note: I left this door unlocked, since it required going through the garage, which had its own locked door. See? Unlocked - the lock in the middle is sideways:

I came home after the birthday part full to the brim of apple crisp and joy, because that's what birthday parties do to people. I came in through the garage, grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and....nothing happened. It wouldn't turn, and I was locked out. Had I locked it on my way out, this wouldn't have been anything. But I had purposefully left it unlocked, because I knew I was going to come back in this way. Ergo...someone else must have locked it, and NO ONE ELSE WAS HERE. Cue internal panic.

I raced around to the front door and opened it cautiously, assuming I was about to see my house ransacked. But when I opened the door, everything was in its place and the whole house felt eerily silent. I started creeping around looking for any sign of the Someone in the house, but I left the front door wiiiiiide open in case I needed to make a quick getaway. In retrospect, it would have been smart to have grabbed a weapon of some sort (shovel? garden hoe? cast iron frying pan?) from the garage, but I guess I wasn't thinking that clearly. The door was indeed locked (the lock in the middle is upright):

Eventually, I determined there was no one downstairs, so I tiptoed up the staircase and froze immediately.

See that black thing through the doorway? I believe my exact thoughts were, "I'm going to die. That is the leg of a well-dressed bandit wearing black slacks, and he is about to murder me." At this point I was shaking a little too much for my own good, and as I silently made my way back down the stairs to the open door, I suddenly remembered I had hung a dark hoodie on the doorknob of the bathroom closet, and that there was not, in fact, a hell-bent marauder hiding in my bathroom.

I subsequently searched the rest of the house, and after convincing myself that no one was actually there, I finally went and shut the front door. The friends came over later and told the story with a laugh or three, but that night I locked my bedroom door and spent the entire night like this:

We'll see how long it takes me to recover my initial home-alone confidence....and I never did determine how that door locked itself in the first place.

Woodstock Writings