Spiderman Adventures

First of all, if this is one of my kids reading this entry, STOP RIGHT NOW! Go read a nice, quiet, safe book in your bedroom and don't come out until you are 18 years old!

A problem at work came up on Tuesday, so I ended up staying really late. I didn't come back to the apartment until around 3:30am. When I got to the apartment, the door was locked. It is Texas law that every rental has a deadbolt to lock landlords out, meaning that once it is locked from the inside, you can't get in from the outside. So even though I had my keys with me, I was stuck.

My roommate Jordan (who is awesome, I want to state for the record) had accidentally locked me out. I saw his truck parked in front of our building, so I was sure he was asleep. I phoned his cell phone twice, and got no answer. I knocked as loud on the door as I dare, because our neighbor's door is right next to ours. Still no answer.

I weighed my options. Should I go back to work (only about a 5 minute drive)? With the strong AC and people showing up between 6 and 7, sleep would be pretty miserable there. Should I go in my car and sleep? I could, but the sun would be up at 6am, and then I wouldn't be able to sleep anymore, and Jordan still wouldn't be awake so I would still be stuck. What to do?

Our apartment has a small patio that you can get to through glass sliding doors from the main room and from Jordan's bedroom. So all I had to do was to walk around the back of the building through some dense brush and fallen trees, climb onto the patio, and then I could knock directly onto the sliding door to Jordan's room. Surely that would wake him up! No problem!

Did I mention that our apartment is on the 3rd floor?


Two stories up...


Two stories down...

Falling? Gravity? What's that? Honestly, my biggest worry was that someone would see me and think that I was trying to break into a place. Which I guess I was. In both apartments below mine, there was one light on. I watched for a while, but didn't see anyone moving. I hoped that they just forgot to turn the light off when they went to bed.

I started to climb. Each patio has a black metal fence around the bottom half. I was able to reach the lowest fence from the ground and climb on top of it. Standing on top of the fence, I climbed on the square wooden post until I could reach the next metal fence. Then I would pull myself up to the next metal fence and repeat the process.



The whole climb probably only took me 1 - 2 minutes, including time spent looking into people's windows to see if anyone was awake. (Yes, I was breaking in and a peeping Tom!) When I made it to the top, I felt glad that I had climbed so many trees so I was ready for a moment like this.

Jordan was very confused and disoriented, the poor guy. He had gotten home around midnight, and had assumed that I was in bed already. So he couldn't figure out how I had locked myself out on the patio and needed him to let me in. As tired as he was, he still had a brilliantly simple question: "Why didn't you just use the doorbell? That would have woken me up for sure."

I had forgotten about our apartment's doorbell. Hey, I was tired!

Epilogue: I told some co-workers Wednesday about my adventures and how I got to live my childhood dreams and be Spiderman climbing up a wall and showed them these pictures. Late in the day, when I got back to my desk, someone had removed my name from my nameplate and replaced it with "Spidey".