In the interest of continuing to confirm regularly that I’m alive (for definitions of the word exclusively referring to physical, not emotional, life), I thought I’d try to occasionally share some photos here until I started having independent thoughts again.

These photos actually have an amusing “apartment living” story to go with them. Here goes.

A while ago, I dropped my beloved 2014 Kindle Voyage, a device that had worked flawlessly that entire time. When the screen cracked, at first I thought I could live with it, but it turns out the touchscreen functionality broke, leaving me able to only page back and forth in the book I already had open. (Bright side, I finished that book on the broken Kindle just fine!)

With great reluctance I shared some of my hard-earned cash with that soulless, small-business-crushing, possibly lying-to-Congress behemoth, Amazon. TL;DR: I bought a new Kindle and a case for it. Amazon being Amazon, they shipped in two separate boxes.

Now, you should know that my apartment complex puts an emphasis on “complex,” such that packages frequently go astray as delivery drivers drop them in bizarre and random locations. There’s a lively message board of residents asking if anyone has seen their missing package. (We don’t have a mailroom, and the mailboxes actually face out into the street, so there’s no leaving packages there.)

Anyway, my two packages were marked “delivered to reception” on their arrival day. Not surprisingly, neither actually made it to my door.

On the off-chance that “reception” might mean “the leasing office,” I went there and asked. No dice, and I was the third person in 15 minutes to come asking. Some Amazon delivery driver really went above and beyond on this one!

Fortunately, I’ve lived here long enough to have seen random packages left by my building’s north elevator, an elevator with access to the outside. Sure enough, I found one of my boxes there. Unfortunately, I didn’t find both boxes. Fortunately, the one I found was the Kindle. If I never found the case, oh well, but I didn’t want to waste all that money on the device!

To find the second package, I joined the lively online discussion about packages. One resident mentioned a large pile of boxes in the A building, and I recalled seeing random packages by that gate. I went there, and (I’m going to truncate this story; it’s getting long) after three separate visits wandering around the A building, found my package deep down a hallway next to an interior elevator in, as advertised, an enormous pile of boxes that presumably a lot of other people hadn’t yet stumbled upon:

Notice the friendly orange note? Let me zoom in so you can appreciate it fully:

In case you can’t read it, it says: Hey there! Please do not leave packages here. Deliver to the home. But it’s partially obscured by all the packages delivery drivers have left there.

Mic drop.