What do my keys & a northern pike have in common?

They both spent about 6 hours in my trunk this afternoon!

I'm not sure why all my great stories revolve around fishing; perhaps it is because I relax my mind when I'm fishing to the point of losing it! I am up in Brainerd for my MBA residency weekend (every 6-7 weeks). We had an extended lunch break so I thought I would quick run and wet a line (since today is the fishing opener). I had found out this week that there is a dam on the Gull river where I could fish from shore so I ran up there to do just that, even though it was raining pretty good. I had about 30 minutes to spend and about 10 minutes into it I nailed a nice northern (about 28 inches). When time was up I headed back to the car with my rod, tackle box, & fish. I pulled the keys out of my pocket and opened the trunk and then set the stuff in and shut the trunk.

The plan was to go buy a cheap styrofoam cooler & ice for the northern (which was still alive and flopping around the back of the trunk), then grab some lunch to go, and head back to class. Well, that turned out to be more difficult as I couldn't find the keys - the only explanation could be that I locked them in the trunk. Ugh! Since one of our windows doesn't stay up (it is held there by duct tape) this made it easy to break into the car, but there is no trunk release inside the car either. OK, so at this point let me recap: 1) raining so I'm soaking wet in my jeans & t-shirt, 2) live flopping northern in the trunk, 3) soon-to-be dead northern rotting in my trunk, 4) keys locked in the trunk with the northern, 5) need to get back to where class is, 6) no way to get into trunk.

Longer story less long: I hitched a ride back to where class was, got the name of a locksmith (who went above and beyond to help me out), after class got a ride back to my car, and then fished another 2 hours in 40 degree pouring rain. It's good to be warm and dry.

When I called Tracy about the whole ordeal, she said... "That'll preach" -- we'll see.