What an ordeal! The fact that you and I have been talking about transmission fluid the last few times has me thinking that you had some intuition about this type of thing happening. You listen to your car the way I “listen” to birds, animals, plants, and lately, caterpillars.
On the no house key with your wife, there are ways to get around that. Hide a key for one. We keep one hidden that goes to our front door. Our back door now has a keyless entry with a code. It’s made life so much easier since we installed it 4 years ago. I had been wanting one for a long time. It isn’t wifi enabled, but runs on a 9v battery which I change every year at the New Year.
The front door is a regular key, just in case that battery dies and I’ve made a mistake with the other door. Of course, I keep a house key on my key ring anyway. It’s nice to not need it.
That’s true in a sense (me “listening well”) to our cars, but, even I wouldn’t claim that I can “hear” a hose clamp fatiguing, much less in the lower front of a (getting a bit noisy with age) engine compartment!
“Of course” on the spare key — we had 2, one hidden outside, but my daughter has that one since the spare set of house and car keys that was shuffling back and forth between my daughter and my wife somehow has been misplaced. “Parallel thinking” too, on our part: Since this latest escapade, the notion of some type of keypad based system has been “niggling” at me.
BTW, I have not looked, but, I’ll bet some sort of 9 volt battery supply with solar charging is inexpensively available. Low stress - a Lithium batt would probably take good charges for 10+ years... Placing the small solar panel and running wires could be a bit of a project, tho’. :-)
The “ordeal” was not too bad except for the time it used up. The old graveyard was a very serene place. I wonder just how old some of those unreadable gravestones are.
TODAY would have been bad for such a failure. It is much hotter outside, so I’ve been alternating working out there and inside. Plus I just got done with lunch, so, back out for a bit I go.