To support my spy training inclinations, Jamie got me several spy-type things for my birthday. Among them is a lock-picking tool set and a book that is supposed to teach me how to pick locks. An immediate use for them became available when Clinton locked the screen door at Tony's place, for which he did not have the key. Unfortunately, he did this the day they left for NY for a month and a half. Fortunately, they don't have any pets that he needed to take care of. Unfortunately, our friend Susan was needing to stay at their place. So, you see why the lock-picking was necessary. Earlier this week, Clinton came over, and I was going to learn how to pick a lock real quick, then we were going to head out to Santa Monica to take care of the situation. So, I tried to learn by picking the lock on our front door. Unfortunately, it requires your sense of touch to be “honed” to the sensation of the pins' motion inside the lock. I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to hone my sense of touch in the next 30 minutes.
We decided to go out there anyway, and see if we could figure something else out. There had been two windows left open, one on the staircase up to their second floor apartment and one above the garage. The windows are the kind that have a crank inside to open them, and they open on a vertical axis. We went to work first on the window on the stairs. Almost immediately, an elderly woman popped out of nowhere and asked if we lived there. We, of course, told her that we were breaking in and that she better scram! Wait, no, we were nice. She tried to help us come up with a way to get in and mentioned a ladder for the window above the garage. Then, we noticed a dish network truck parked a block away with a ladder on top of it. We went over there to see if we could borrow it. The guy wouldn't lend it to us without coming along with it, so he said he'd come down when he was done installing the dish he was working on. So, we walked back down to the apartment and hung in the shade (it was well over 90 degrees). I was getting pretty impatient, partially because the dish guy was taking so long, but also because I hate problems, and I want to find solutions asap. So, I went back to examine the door. The hinges were on the outside, so we even tried to take them off. No luck. So, I started fiddling with the window above the staircase again. The window would open about halfway, but there was a screen blocking the crank for us to open it all the way. After some finagling, I got the screen pushed aside, and we got the window open all the way. Now we just had to get through the window somehow. Clinton climbed up and braced himself on the wall and the stair case railing on the other side of the staircase, but it wasn't high enough, so I got below him to offer a foot hold higher up and closer to the wall. I held my hands out in front of me in the form of a foot hold and braced for his weight. What I wasn't expecting was for him to step on my shoulder instead. I was not braced for the weight at that particular juncture. I started to fall back, and images of us both crashing down the stairs flashed through my head. Then, he put his other foot on my other shoulder, and I thought we were goners for sure. As I was falling back, I was able to grab on to the stair case railing and regain my balance. I pushed up, and he was halfway through the window. But then he seemed to be stuck, his legs writhing on the outside as I imagined his torso doing on the inside. Eventually, he wormed his way through and managed to get inside without breaking anything. Victory at last!
The next day, we found out that Susan had a key to the screen door.