I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little lock too

I still say the mailbox started it.

Really, I think we all knew a meltdown was coming. It was only a matter of time.

After a week in the new house, dealing with no hot water in the shower, three different inspections, millions of phone calls, and working extra hard after work to make the house livable, I decided to take Sunday off.

It was a good plan, and I had a good excuse. My friend and I were going to go the Wild Arts Festival to do a little shopping, enjoy the art, and see my 6″x6″ piece.

6 x 6 Ready to GoThe day started out innocently enough. Finn and I took a long walk and a short nap. Then my mom called.

(Now, before I continue with this story, please know (especially because my mom will read this) that I love calls from my mom. However, she has this one bad habit…)

“Hi, Mom, How are you/”

“Fine. How are you?” My spidey sense went off because there was the tiniest pause after “fine” but I (foolishly) ignored it.

“Oh, I’m okay. Just doing a little relaxing. How about you?”

“Well… actually… I spent most of the day in the emergency room.”

Turns out Mom had a small blood clot in her hip from her recent hip replacement. It wasn’t the serious kind, just the looks awful kind, but the doctors wanted to examine it.

However, it isn’t that she was in the emergency room that was bad (necessarily) it’s that she has this habit of not TELLING me about the bad news. When Dad had a stroke it took almost five minutes to get to that point. I guess I’ll look on it as improvement that it only took her two sentences this time. I’ve begged her just to break things to me immediately, but so far the progress has been slow.

I shook off the phone call, thinking the story would just add to my collection of “Mom can’t tell me bad news” stories, and ventured off to meet my friend.

And there I proved (as if there was any doubt) that I really shouldn’t be allowed out in public anymore.

I love the Wild Arts Festival. The art is high quality and of great subject manner. It is in Montgomery Park in NE Portland, which is a nice venue. The only flaw, and it might be only me that sees this as a problem, is that it uses escalators. When going down you look straight down three floors into a bank of windows that in turn overlook the river. It always feels to me like you are jumping off a cliff.

I guess my head state was not great because when I started to go down I got a little scared and dizzy and tried to back up, tripped, pulled a muscle in my leg and toppled over. I didn’t exactly fall down the escalator, but it sure wasn’t a pretty ride down. I limped the rest of the way around the show. I’m still taking Advil today.

After making my way home, I decided to tackle just one more small job that had been plaguing me… my mailbox. When I got the keys to the house, the mailbox key was not in there. Saturday evening a woman came to the door; she turned out to be the wife of the contractor who worked on my house. She was cleaning out her files and came across two keys, one for the regular locks and one for the mailbox. She gave the keys and her husband’s business card to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the key work.

So Sunday I decided to get out the WD40 and give it a shot. That didn’t work. Shocking.

Then I tried Google.

I tried a lock picking attempt.

I tried a lock picking attempt using Google.

I tried wire.

I tried a wrench.

I tried more WD40. I broke the key in the lock.

Finally, I decided to “drill out” the lock.

drilled“Drilling out” doesn’t work. I don’t care what Google says.

So I got out a hammer and a very long flat head screwdriver. And I whacked that stupid lock until it opened.

18 tools.

tools118. Tools.

tools2But I won.

boxWah-haa-ha-ha.

It only cost $3.69 to get a new lock.

He-ha-ha-ha!

Don’t mess with me!