Ax and you shall receive

Last New Year's Eve, my entire family was locked out of our house. For over an hour.

Maybe I should explain.

As far as holiday traditions go, my nuclear family probably has the simplest ones. For the last few years, we just open a bottle of champagne and don't even bother cooking anything for media noche. There is usually bread of some sort, and maybe some fruit (well, there is ALWAYS a fruit in the house ... wink wink ...), and definitely leftovers from the entire season of food. For entertainment, we go out on the street and watch our neighbors' fireworks (which, I have to mention, has been getting bigger and better and louder, so much so that when I took a video this year, all you could hear on playback is my frightened screams of 'OH MY GOD!').

Oh wait. I have proof ... of my cowardice.

Sorry about the wires. I was pretending they could shield me.

Last year was no exception. After forcing ourselves away from the TV/bed, my parents, little (?) sister Mia and I went outside just before 12 AM to check out the explosions and such.

It was nice. Loud booms and ringing bells and clanging gongs (yes, gongs) and semi-irritating horns. Sparkly fountains of color through the haze. 'Tangled'-like lanterns pretending to be nearby planets (see vid below – I obviously just found out you can upload YouTube vids on Blogger and am going embed-crazy).

If you haven't seen Tangled, get to it. It's fantastic. Hi Zachary Levi.

Then we all had enough and headed back to the house. And that's when we discovered the locked door.

To this day, no one knows exactly what happened. Who was the last person to exit and possibly mindlessly lock the door before stepping out? Could've been me (maybe I needed new blog topics), could've been any other sleepy person with me that night. Allegedly, the door locked itself sometimes but I have trouble believing that because ... how the hell???

The upside is we have proven to ourselves that our house is EXTREMELY, FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to break into, especially given that zero members of the family are international spies or savage criminals (this is only an assumption). My window-grill–obsessed architect father had successfully protected all of the possible ways to insert a fully grown human into the existing openings. Even if the house keys were on top of a table 6 feet from the windows (they weren't), there were also no fishing poles or extendable clamps in sight.

Just to be clear: There have never been any fishing poles or extendable clamps in our house in my lifetime.

Thankfully, my dad kept a small set of assorted tools near the garden (which, like us, was also outside the house). After many unsuccessful attempts at using the garden shears, a hammer and chisel, a screwdriver, and other tools I can't remember now, dad decided that the best item to use was an old, rusty ax. So my poor father spent the first hour of 2012 hacking away at the ridiculously sturdy doorknob.

This was the aftermath:

You could say these were ... *puts on sunglasses*
... axed out.
HHHYYYEEEAAAAAHHHH!!!

The victim.

After over an hour that felt like a whole year (we should've checked if the fireworks were restarting), we were finally able to sit down at the dining table, drink some much-needed alcohol and laugh feebly at the first misadventure of 2012.

Last night, the final night of 2012, I reminded my parents to leave the door just slightly ajar as they exited to watch the fireworks. Dad, on the other hand, had other ideas. And possibly a trauma-filled memory of last year's fiasco.

And so:

Dad: McGyver. Me: Giving away age by using McGyver references.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

May we all learn from our mistakes and remember to never completely close the door.

(Unless you have valuables in the house or something. Then that would be just foolish.)