With our wedding coming up so soon, I was hoping for a relaxing month of July. Full of sunny weekends hiking in the mountains. Looking forward to my greatest excitement coming from wondering who’s going to get kicked off next in Survivor.

So, on a late Friday night after a particularly crazy work week, I am dozing off in the chair when I hear two words that you never want to hear in your own home, no matter what side of the law you’re on: “Freeze! Police!” I wake up Jeff and have him poke his head outside in time to see about nine cops accosting one of our downstairs neighbors. Over the next four hours we watch the police go through our neighbors’ car and pull out bag after bag of money and drugs. It appears that we were wasting our time being annoyed by the frat boys on the third floor, when we should’ve been concerned about the crack dealers on the ground floor with the lovely view of the dumpster. Of course, who in their right mind would pay this kind of money for a view of the dumpster but crack dealers?

Saturday we get up late (all the excitement had kept us up well into the night) and take a nice afternoon stroll around Greenlake and grab a bite to eat for lunch. After we come home our next-door fourth floor neighbor knocks on our door to tell us that they have been burglarized. They had simply jimmied through the ample gap between the doorframe and the door with a crowbar, and pushed the door in. The deadbolt went less than an inch into the crumbling wooden doorframe, and  one-and-a-half inch screws (instead of the standard three-inch screws) secured the metal reinforcing strikeplate. The cop who came to the scene said they may has well have just left the door open.

Our poor neighbors lost everything. We just lost our minds. Realizing that living in a “secure” building means nothing when your apartment also rents to crack dealers and your door is held shut by nothing stronger than chewing gum and paperclips, we snapped into action, or a form thereof. We first went to Home Depot to buy new doorlocks and deadbolts and a drill. Then we went back to Home Depot to find a borer to enlarge the hole left by our non-standard deadbolt. Then back again to get some stain to cover the big gouge left in the door when we tried to enlarge the bored hole - but instead sent the drill skidding across the door. Then back to Home Depot to exchange the first lock and deadbolt set because our door handle was too far from the edge of the door to be compatible. Only at midnight did we finally stop, since it was clearly far too late to be running power tools.

I think Sunday may have only brought four or five more trips to Home Depot before the project was finished. Of course, every time we left the apartment we were afraid nothing would be there when we returned. The remainder of the weekend was spent shredding every document we had that had our name, birthdate, social security number or any account number on it. Then we had to take off Monday to get to the bank to open up a safe-deposit box and meet with George Costanza, salesman for ADT home security. (Well, his last name was Costanza and he looked like Jason Alexander and the hard-sell made me wonder which crooks I should be more worried about. Master of his domain indeed). We looked around our little home and wondered what someone would want to steal. We have nice stuff, but I’m not sure what the secondary market value is on used cookware.  Bottom line is, we feel better now with our 92-decibal alarm and instant police notification. Of course it took a few weeks to get it installed, and in the meantime we were afraid to leave the house. So our sunny July weekends were spent at home, shredding documents and watching TV.

Thank god for Survivor.