Locked and Unlocked Doors

Things that make you go Hmmm …

My husband is really bad about locking the door when he goes out of the house. He’s not bad about locking the front door when he goes to work or goes out for several hours. It’s the back door that causes all the problems with him.

He goes outside to bbq and doesn’t lock the door when he comes back inside.

He goes out into the garden or to sit out on the patio and doesn’t lock the door when he returns.

He takes garbage or recycling outside, or just goes out to check the temperature and doesn’t lock up when he returns.

It’s not unusual for me to find the back door unlocked at midnight or early in the morning after he’s gone to work. I’m the door locker around here it seems.

The only time that my husband consistently locks the back door is when I’m outside doing something in the garden and he’s decided it’s time for him to return inside.

Hmmm do you think that means something?

Speaking of locked doors, our boarder has started to not lock the front door when she returns home from school. I’ve found it unlocked when I’ve come inside from the backyard. How the heck can I make sure no one is entering the house that shouldn’t if I’m in the backyard?

This morning our boarder breached the lock door rule in the worst way. She left the house at 8 a.m. and didn’t lock the door. I came downstairs when I woke up to find the door unlocked.

We air-condition our house with window air-conditioners. When I’m upstairs in our room I can’t hear what goes on downstairs. Anyone could have walked in and robbed us or worse.

Worse still … we live in a pretty good neighborhood but no area is truly crime free, is it? I was listening to the news today and heard that a house just four major blocks from here was invaded early this morning. The homeowner was tied up by two or three assailants. There hasn’t been further news yet but I’m curious to find out more about this since it happened so close to our home.

Update: I did find out more about it and it turns out that it’s a dumb criminal story, perfect for my other blog Odd Planet. I’m posting the story of the Sleeping Criminals right now. LOL

And here I find our door unlocked. All I could think of when I heard about the home invasion was how easy it would have been for someone to break in and do that to my husband and I while we slept upstairs, oblivious to the breach of security.

I’m furious.

My husband and I had planned to sit down and talk with her about this when she came home from school and let her know that we were very upset that the door had been unlocked. As I said above she almost never locks it when she returns home from school, so I’ve slowly been becoming upset with her over this anyway.

What does my husband do instead? While I was in another room he whispered to her buddy buddy like and told her that she’d left the door unlocked and that it had better not happen again. He spoke to her as if I didn’t know about it and like it was a secret between them.

Chris doesn’t like confrontations or controversy. He holds all his stress inside and tries to avoid unpleasant situations. Not necessarily a healthy thing. Sure you can’t go around blowing up over little things all the time, but I think that if you get your frustration out, even over small things, when something is bothering you that you handle stress better overall, especially when something really bad happens. My husband lets it all build up inside and as a result when some huge problem arises that ends up causing a lot of stress (ie illness in family, death, major money issues etc) he doesn’t handle it all that well.

So I think he was trying to avoid a big blow up. We had one last week when I found out that our boarder had thrown out a sandwich that she’d made herself for her own lunch last week, since she’s decided that, get this – she doesn’t like sandwiches or bread anymore? Huh … she made a sandwich – Herself – then she throws it out? What a waste. See my post Little princess is driving me mad for more info on the stuff that’s been going on in the past week or two with our boarder.

We gave in, as we always seem to do, on the sandwich thing and we’re letting her make her own food. She expressed a desire to eat sushi for lunch from now on. Fine, tell me how much it’s going to cost, and if it comes in at the same price as the sandwiches that we’ve been making for you, or the ones you’ve been making for yourself you can do it. Turns out the very simple sushi is in the same price range so we went with her on Sunday to Korea town and bought the supplies.

Sigh … last night she was complaining that sushi is too hard to make and very time consuming. If she gives up on this it’s back to sandwiches. I’m not going back and forth anymore. This is it.

We’ve been giving in to a lot of her demands requests. All we ask of her is that she locks the door when she leaves and when she returns, cleans her room once a week, rinses her dishes after eating (not wash, just rinse), and keep the air-conditioner that we placed in her room turned on if she’s got her door open, if she’s on the main floor with us, or if she’s out of the house – if we’ve asked her to have it on. I don’t think that we are asking too much, and we’ve given far more than we’ve asked for in return.

Last night she breached the air conditioning rule. She came home from school at around 5 pm, and decide that she was exhausted due to the heat outside so she went upstairs for a nap. I’d had her air-conditioner turned up high. She turned it off. Fine, the door was closed, it doesn’t matter if it’s on or off if the door is closed because it’s not doing anything to cool the house when her door is closed.

At about 6:30 she came down for dinner, then proceeded to look through our phone for past phone calls. She was looking for one of her friends numbers. I regret showing her that feature on the phone because of course she’s seeing all the people who have called us when she does that and it feels like an invasion of privacy when she does that. (really, read the princess story and see how she thinks her privacy was invaded!)

Anyway, we had dinner and she proceeded to use our phone for about an hour and a half. When she first moved in she had a cell phone but she got rid of it … now she uses ours. grrr. At 9 p.m. she decided to go and meet some friends. Fine. Out the door she goes at 9:20 p.m. or so. A while later I noticed that our main floor was getting warm and I happened to go upstairs. Her air conditioner wasn’t even turned on. It was still 30 Celsius ( 86 F) at 10 pm last night, but it felt warmer due to extreme humidity. Not a good time to have an air conditioner turned off if you are lucky enough to have one. Plus, I had a fever all day yesterday, I didn’t need a warm house when I was in that condition.

When she came home we told her about her air-conditioner being off and figured it had been off for 5 hours considering she had said she turned it off when she went up for a nap at 5 pm. She’s done this before, so I told her that if she did it again we would remove the air conditioner from her room. She turns it off most of the time when she’s in there, so it’s not like this is a huge punishment or anything, and if we moved it we’d gain back control of it.

Today it’s 36 Celsius (98.6 F) with a heat index of 47 C (116 F). That’s damn hot. If she turns off her air conditioner today on top of leaving the house unlocked this morning war will break out tonight.

Hubby and I are going to have a talk with her at dinner time about the unlocked door. I asked Chris why he spoke to her so secretively about finding the door unlocked this morning and he said he just didn’t want to have a confrontation. Unfortunately I think this is a very serious issue so we need to discuss it together. I don’t want it to end up in a fight or argument. I just want her to understand how serious an issue it could be if we’d been robbed or worse because she left the door unlocked. She needs to take some responsibility for her actions.

We are looking for a new boarder. If we find one in the next few days we are going to give her notice to move out. She’s driving me insane. She is the BIGGEST problem in my life right now and I have the power to stop it. It’s just unfortunate that we need a boarder at all at this time.

Big changes ahead.

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For those who inquired and sent good thoughts and prayers for Chris he’s doing better. He didn’t go to work yesterday because he didn’t feel great when he got up but he’s been doing well since then. I don’t think the stress in the house does him any good, especially since he doesn’t handle stress well. We need to eliminate the major source of stress and soon.