My husband locked me out of the house

Seriously.

He was going out to the car, and for some reason, he hit the lock on the front door, and I didn't see him do it. And I followed him out to the car, and I wished him luck and all of that, and he got in the car and started the engine. And I get to the front door just as it is closing. And it's locked.

Crap.

So I yell at him, and he doesn't hear me, and he drives to the stop sign. And I yell at him and run after the car a bit, and he still doesn't hear me. He drives away.

Crap.

Okay, so I'm wearing what rather looks like pajamas (not even matching pajamas), and since the pants don't have pockets I don't have my keys to get in. And I don't have my cell phone, and I don't even have a bottle of water.

Crap.

I'm locked out of my house, in the summer, in Texas, with no cell phone and no water.

After a few minutes I stop and think that isn't exactly true. I do at least have water. I can at least get water out of the garden hose. It is very unlikely that I'm going to die of thirst. I can probably just wait for him to get back.

I don't really want to walk to the office to get someone to unlock the door for me. I think that there's a fee for doing that if it isn't a emergency. This probably doesn't count as an emergency.

Besides, I don't want anyone to see me in these things that look like pajamas, that don't match, and that are starting to rip near the waist.

I can just sit here and wait for him to get back. He will probably be gone about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Maybe two hours if he goes to get something for lunch on the way home. I think that I should try waiting an hour, maybe an hour and a half before I panic and ask someone for help. Cause I really don't want to walk to the office looking like this, and I don't have any money to pay if they decide this is a non-emergency service call.

I'm not wearing a watch. I don't have my cell phone. And I'm certainly not sitting in front of a computer. How am I supposed to know when an hour has past?

Crap.

Okay, if I just sit in the shade and do nothing, I won't get too hot. And I have a few chairs out here. I go and get one and put it in the shade. I sit down and wait.

I can't do it. I can't just sit and do nothing. No book to read. No music to listen to. No one to talk to.

Oh, and the frog lady might see me. The frog lady might see me out here wearing what look like mismatched pajamas.

The frog lady might even come out and talk to me.

I can't just sit here. I have to go out in the backyard and find something to do.

I find an empty milk jug and fill it with water. I could do a bit of gardening. I do have water.

I shovel a bit of dirt. I get hot, but I know that I have water. I don't panic.

I find a plastic cup. It will be easier to drink water from a cup. And I'm supposed to drink two liters of water a day. I guess that won't be a problem today.

I drink some water and shovel a bit more dirt. This might not be so bad. I might end up drinking the whole gallon of water and moving all of this dirt.

It occurs to me that I've been locked out of the house and can't get to the bathroom.

Perhaps this is not the best time to drink a whole gallon of water.

Crap.

I stop shoveling the dirt and weed out the pepper plants instead. That needed to be done anyway, and it isn't as much work as shoveling dirt.

Time for some water and a bit of rest. I go back to the chair in the front yard. I sit in front of the door.

The husband comes home.

"Why are you sitting out here?"

"You locked me out of the house."

He thinks that is very funny.

Of course he thinks it is funny. I had really been afraid, and he thinks it is funny. Everything is a joke.

Okay, it was a little bit funny.

Still, if it had been the other way around, I wouldn't have locked him out of the house. I would have kept watching him until he went inside the house, so I would have noticed something was wrong and not driven away.

I ended up being locked out of my house for almost exactly an hour. The pepper plants have been weeded, and I moved half a mound of dirt.

WTF does it mean if someone is LOL with their BFF?

I hate all of these little abbreviations. Can't people just write in English? People are even starting to speak in these nonsense terms. I can't make sense of half of it.

Science fiction writers used to imagine that the English language would change over time, for all sorts of odd reasons. Some thought that we would all learn some kind of multilingual shorthand to communicate with people from other countries, and that we would either add a lot more foreign words to English or perhaps give up speaking English altogether. Some thought that we would shorten words or phrases to conserve oxygen. Some thought that we would add or change to sign language because of all the noise.

I don't think any of them predicted that the language would change so quickly because of idiot teenagers sending text messages.

I hate cell phones and people who talk on cell phones a lot. Cell phones for doctors and other people who need to be reached quickly in an emergency is a good idea. Having an emergency phone in case your car breaks down is a good idea. Having a phone so that you can call for help if a date goes bad is a good idea.

Having a phone conversation with one person while you're supposed to be having dinner with someone else is NOT a good idea. Having someone from work trying to call to say something that can wait till business hours is NOT a good idea. Waiting till the last minute to tell people stuff just because you can probably get their cell phone is NOT a good idea. Making a phone call while you are mere inches away from me in a public restroom is NOT a good idea.

So I already hated the cell phones. Now I'm getting the nonsense abbreviations in my emails, from adults. If someone wants to say something, why do they need to type IMHO? I've already forgotten whatever your opinion was while I'm trying to figure out what is an IMHO.


A friend of mine feels the need to put IMHO opinion in almost all of her emails. One day she was saying something about inconsiderate people at work who leave stuff a mess in the break-room. She meant to send it out to the usual bunch but accidentally sent it to everyone at work, which wasn't really a bad idea anyway considering the content of the email. But half these people were not used to getting my friend's emails with IMHO, and they didn't know what IMHO meant, and rather than talk about the break-room situation they emailed back and asked her what IMHO meant. And a couple of people emailed back and asked if she really was a ho and why did she feel the need to share that with everyone?

When I was still pretty new to the whole blog thing, I left a comment on someone's blog and checked back later to see if they wrote a response. LATS was in the response, and I didn't have a clue what LATS meant. I asked a few people, and I emailed my friend who writes IMHO in most of her emails, and no one knew what it meant. And I googled LATS and found stuff about library software and exercises aimed at certain muscles and stuff about the Latin American Thyroid Society, but none of that had anything to do with the blog comment. I just couldn't figure it out, and I gave up.

A couple days later I saw it again and figured out that LATS meant me.

My husband had a blog before I did, and that was what led to the whole mess last year. So he's not supposed to blog much anymore, not supposed to spend so much time on the computer, and he's not supposed to talk to strangers on the Internet, etc... I said that he could come home and we could work on our relationship, but there were conditions. None of the conditions have been met, and he just went and got a new blog.

Well, he doesn't like the new blog as much, cause no one was reading it and no one was leaving comments. So one day he came over here and left a comment, and like most people he left a link to his blog. I deleted the comment. He's not supposed to communicate with other bloggers at all, and he's certainly not allowed to come over here and snag some of my readers. He can comment under a different name without the link, and I don't link to his blog either.

Having set that rule, I shouldn't try to snag one of his readers. He finally got a comment, and it was from a published author. I was a bit jealous.

That didn't come out right, did it? I've had comments from a published author too. And now that I think about it, I've had comments from more than one published author. But this was someone whose name I recognized, someone I knew of as an author before I knew of him as a blogger. To be honest, I have yet to connect the author's name with anything I remember reading, but still, I did recognize the name and thought that was very cool.

But, since I had already made this rule, I can't leave comments on the author's blog that link back to my blog.

Anyway, I had been thinking about writing this post for a while, and what finally got me to write it was I started commenting on something the author said about the new cell phones from Apple. So there it is. I don't like cell phones or all these abbreviations, and I really hate that adults are going along with this trend started by idiot teenagers.

One last thing. I'm sure David is familiar with TANSTAAFL, and probably Dmarks knows about it too, but does anyone else know what it is? Does anyone try to use it in a conversation that isn't about one of the books it's from? My husband uses it once in a while and looks at me funny when I don't immediately get what he's saying.

***************UPDATE***************************

It is now a year later, and I've noticed many lost souls come here trying to find out what the text message WTF means. If you still don't know, it stands for -- what the f**k? And while we're at it, IMHO is short for -- in my humble opinion.