Ouch.

I have a huge (and I mean HUGE) bruise on the back of my left calf. How did I get it you ask? Well, I’ll tell you – attempting to climb through my bedroom window. Why was I doing that, you ask? A reasonable question. Answer: I accidentally locked myself out of the house.

So, in order to get back in, I had to access the only window that was unlocked, which was my bedroom window. This situation has happened in the past (and here I would like to digress to point out that in this and other cases, the reason I was locked out of the house was not entirely my fault. In fact, I would go so far as to say very little of it was my fault. In my house, I never use the locks on the door handles, I only use the deadbolt. So, it’s not usually a problem for me to close the door behind me when I go outside, because if I want to lock the door, I have to use the key. But, on the occasions when someone else has been in the house – say feeding my cats while I’m out of town, as was recently the case – these other people tend to sometimes use the handle locks, which I have no way of knowing until I am locked out of the house)

Anyway, the last time this happened, I was able to get in through the window in the guest room, which is actually slightly closer to the ground than the one in my bedroom. Alas, that window was locked. So, I get this like, bench/stool thing from the backyard, put it under the window, and climb up. I get the window open, pry the screen loose, and shove the bed out of the way (yes, the bed is in front of the window, but fortunately I have hardwood floors and have therefore attached those little felt circles to the feet of all the furniture. In addition to keeping the floors from getting scratched, it makes it pretty easy to slide the furniture around.) Now, as I have said, this window is slightly higher off the ground, and as a result, the thing I was standing on was not quite tall enough to allow me to step through the window and onto the floor of the house. I tested it out by putting my leg through the window, and discovered that I would have to use my arms to hoist myself up to the windowsill while simultaneously not falling off the stool and not knocking myself unconscious by banging my head into the window itself—a prospect I was not sure I could pull off. So, I was standing there with one leg in the window, trying to decide the next move. That’s when the stool decided to fall over.

Luckily, it was near the exterior wall of the house, which it hit and which kept it from turning over entirely. But, it did leave me balanced on its steeply sloped surface hanging by one leg from the window sill. As the metal window frame pressed painfully into my leg and began forming the giant bruise on my calf, I tried to pull myself up, right the stool, and generally try not to break any of my vital body parts. I managed to extricate my leg, break the frame of the window screen, and fall on my ass, but was otherwise unharmed. Except for the aforementioned extremely painful and now huge and purple bruise, of course.

As my cats came over to help by attempting to escape through the now open and screenless window, I decided it was time to call in reinforcements. Standing on the now righted stool, I could reach through the bedroom window to the phone on my nightstand, which I used to call the holder of my spare keys to come over and let me the hell back in.