After our house was broken into last July when we were in Australia, we've bolstered security in various ways. We've got a safety deposit box for a cache of Cassy's jewellry and various other ingenious spots around the house where things can be secreted away from prying thieves. We changed the lock on the giant outer steel door to a quadruple lock combination, which, while a pain to lock and unlock, is pretty much impregnable. The last piece in this Houdiniesque parade of steel security was the replacement of the old wooden inner door with a steel security replacement.
If some magician manages to get through the outer door (which would take an oxy-acetylene torch or equivalent) they now have to deal with a solid steel inner door with a steel door frame bolted about a foot into the surrounding walls. We stayed home for about 4 hours for the installation of this superhero of doors on Saturday. It was an amazing operation involving three men, precision fitting the new after mass destruction of the old door and frame. It entailed a whole lot of drilling and bashing before subsequent filling and finessing. The lounge room was an unholy mess as old mate decided that our marble floor was a good spot to make his cement slurry to fill in around the door frame.....ohhh! Cass and I did an industrial cleanup later and got the inner and outer doors and surrounds cleaner than they've probably ever been!
After all that effort, we decided the only reward was a trip downtown to the noteworthy and oft-visited Romano's Macaroni Grill. The exquisite fare at this establishment is always of the same sublime quality, the service outstanding and the quirky house singers always give us some unusual entertainment. Last time a tiny opera singer with a huge voice graced the dining room, while this time it was a honey-throated young man soprano playing a ukelele! Good fun.
The trip down was a bit more than we wanted after our busy day and we got crushed onto the third of three trains. After swaying with the crowd who were packed in like sardines in a tin, we demurred on the return underground trip and lashed out on a taxi door-to-door for the trip home.
Sunday was the last soak of dripping humidity for the season we hope...it was a moist mop of a thing, and we sweltered for most of the day before relenting and switching on the air-conditioner. Today and the rest of the week are supposed to be composed of "sprinkles" or "showers" and lovely autumn temperatures around the mid 20s....at last!
Photos: The escalator between trains two and three on Saturday night (it was only 5.30 p.m.!), Macaroni Grill, some of my kids hard at work last week, and the new "impregnable barricade"!