Auto Blunder

Amwilli: Let's take the poochie for a walk.

Me: Great, I'll bring my camera.

[Once outside]

Me: Oh no, it's raining— can I put the camera in your car?

Amwilli: Sure

[walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk]

Grabbed my camera on the way back in, but wanted to take the opportunity to practice with the macro, and take some raindrop photos...

Once we got to our door, we realized the keys were still in the car. Now, for normal people this would be no problem— just get the spare and there you go. Unfortunately we're not normal and don't have a spare :-/

Yup... there they are:

To avoid Geico or locksmith fees, we decided to give this thing a go. We scoured the Internet and armed ourselves with state-of-the-art tools to get the door open:

as well as a trusty assistant...

Then we got to work

Our assistant was a strongly in favor of picking the lock.

The wire hanger shimmying did NOT work (shocker)...

So I shuffled off to the auto parts store to get a slim jim.

aka this thing:

After poking around inside the door (to no avail), we went BACK to the Internet for more research, found an awesome video about wedging the door open and scooting something in to pull on the lock. The wedge system didn't work for the first few minutes, then we got smart.

I turned the hanger into a loop to lasso the window crank and got it to turn enough to slip the slim jim through the window.

Once the slim jim was close enough to the door lock, we pressed as hard as we could and got it to swing open! You would have thought we'd won the lottery with the screams of relief I let out. And what an amazing sense of accomplishment!

Unfortunately, the door didn't take kindly to all the shimmying and jimmying.

Oops.

But at least I got some practice in, right?!