Paula Light is the lovely hostess for The Monday Peeve, where I get to do the thing I cannot do in real life – air my inner most complaints.

The door to get from the kitchen to the back garden is broken! Gah! It’s been broken since May and I’m about to want to rip someone’s head off after getting locked out of my own house for probably the 5th time this summer.

Last night, I was about to call it a night in the garden and get back into the house before getting mauled by the mosquitoes when I noticed the bucket was on the stoop. In it was about a half-bucket full of water – mom’s shower water.

Each night when we shower, we have to let our water run for a few minutes to warm up since we don’t want to catch a cold showering in icy cold water, so instead of letting all that water go to waste, we reuse it back in the garden.

Anyway, it was getting dark, so I went and turned the kitchen night light on before heading out to dump that bucket of water into another bucket since I just finished watering and there’s nothing more to water. I shut the sliding door, perhaps a little too hard, because the next moment, I saw the lock go “plop”. Down it went.

At this point, my phone was upstairs in my room, the AC was on, therefore, no window was open, and mom shut the door to her bedroom so she heard nothing. Panic surged over me with a wave of red hot anger as I hurried to unlock the side gate and rang the doorbell like ten times before mom asked, “Who is it?”

Who do you think, you moron?! I wanted to scream but instead, I shouted, “It’s me!” Mom opened the door, confused and before she could speak, I interjected. “The stupid door locked me out again!”

…in my defense, I tried to change the lock but couldn’t find a replacement and I’ve scoured the internet. It’s another one of those lovely gifts from the previous owners, I guess.

If you want to know another lovely gift from the previous owners, it’s the raspberry canes in my garden. First of all, raspberries are such bullies in the garden, they are like mint, they spread everywhere. Second of all, these raspberries canes have thorns worse than rose bushes. My hands and legs are full of cuts from harvesting raspberries that they make me look like I constantly cut myself for a hobby.