I tried it once, and got lost :), so I was looking for an opportunity to bike early in the morning so that there will be no traffic, and on a day when I won’t have to go somewhere. Last Sunday, I decided that it’s now or never. The potential forty-minute round trip took over an hour, but at least I found the Garden!
The catch is that you can’t “bike to” that garden, you need to walk your bike on the last stretch. And Google was bringing me to the parking lot “under” the garden from where there was no way to get to the garden itself.
In addition to working two jobs simultaneously and having never-ending crises on both, I dealt with one more problem.
Over a week ago, when the rains were really heavy, we had the building utility basement flooded. I didn’t think much about it: there is a bike room and storage units there, and nothing else. Our board members encouraged us to check the content of the units, but I thought I am fine: my unit is the closest to the bike storage, and I see it every day.
However, on Monday, I finally decided to move to storage a utility cart, which was sitting on my balcony. When I opened my unit, I realized that one of the cardboard boxes was sitting on the floor, not on the shelves. I thought that I should move it back to the apartment for a while since now I know that I have space, but I never got to do this. And now, the box was visibly wet and damaged.
It turned out that I was not even aware of how many letters I had! I didn’t have space to set them dry, and I didn’t have time! This week was very work-intense, I tried to squeeze a half-hour here and there, but it was not enough.
Some letters and dairies were almost intact and required very little time to dry. Others were so wet that the paper was falling apart, or the ink would get almost dissolved. Some wet pieces of paper or postcards were pressed together so that I could not take them apart, and then they dried that way. I will need to spend some time over the long weekend sorting this stuff out.
Hettie's Reflections 