I came prepared for cold and today I’m sitting in the apartment in rolled up shirt sleeves. It is supposed to reach 75 degrees outside today. My son and I went to another apartment for lunch and I didn’t have any need for a flannel to walk outside. Spring has arrived and the park grows greener every day.
Last week at the birthday party that were just hints of green. Some of the bulbs were sending up shoots that just broke through the dirt. A few of the trees were beginning to bud, but they didn’t look green at all when you got close to them. Only when you looked at them from a distance did the spots of green in each add up to the tinges of green we saw.
This week when we went for our walk park everything seemed to be bursting out. I was caught by surprise to see the trees near the basketball courts bursting with pink blossoms. When we took our long walk a few weeks ago we had seen one small yellow flower in a row of shrubs. This time the shrub seemed solid yellow from a distance. I love the smaller and simpler flowers. The blooms are almost always perfect, unlike the more complex varieties. I know there are people who grow perfect roses but the ones I see always have some touch of disease or aging.
The pictures don’t do justice to the blaze of color that will be arriving in a few weeks. The shoots from the bulbs are getting taller every day and soon the blossoms will begin to form. We will only be here for another week, so we’ll probably miss the real explosion of color that is coming. Also, only a few of the trees have budded, so everywhere will get much greener in the next few weeks.
While I was cleaning the kitchen at our apartment a few days ago I looked out and noticed that a housecleaning crew was working on the apartment directly across from us. This is unusual by itself since access to this complex by non-residents has been very limited. It is a sign that the coronavirus situation is improving when the house cleaners can come in again.
The other thing I noticed was that they were using a window cleaning robot. I have wondered how you clean the outside of windows that are ten stories up. It would be possible to use ropes and some sort of lift device, but this seemed safer and easier. From what I could see it appeared to be doing a good job on the windows.
A few nights ago, we had a sandstorm. Apparently, this is not unusual, but it has been a while since there has been one in this part of the city. We didn’t go out in it. We heard the roar and saw the loose garbage flying high in the air. We think that one impact of this storm was to make our apartment entry keypad stop functioning. We left our kids’ apartment and walked across the complex to our apartment. All the buildings require card access. I took my card out of my wallet and held it up to the scanner. There was no beep. Shirley got out her card and held it up with the same result. With all the security restrictions in place we initially thought we might have been intentionally locked out.
Fortunately, there was another way to get into our building. Underneath all the apartments and running through the entire complex is a large parking garage. The garage also doubles as a shelter. There is one garage for all the buildings, so it is possible to enter from one building and walk to another building. I thought this was possibly a major hole in security, but when we got to our building, we discovered that there was a card scanner that limited access to both the stairs and elevator. The boys had been in the parking garage before and they guided us from their building to ours. When we tried our cards at our building, we discovered that they worked, and we began to realize that there was probably something wrong with the outside scanner that had been exposed to the storm. It had been a great adventure exploring the parking garage. It was something I had wanted to do anyway and the need to get into our apartment just heightened the adventure. We checked when we went out the next morning and the outside scanner worked just fine.
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