I Miss My Deck!

I miss my deck!  I knew when I moved here that I wouldn't have one.  Still, I liked the apartment, the layout the building, and the location of it.  The place had everything!  Everything, except my own personal deck.  I knew that, but I still took it. There is a public deck up on the top floor. It's available to all of us.  It is seldom crowded so it is semi - well, almost semi-private most of the time.  I could deal with that.  No big deal.

 But as summer approaches, again, I'm finding that I DO miss having my own private deck!  Not enough to forego my lovely apartment, mind you, but Oh, how nice it would be, to  take my cup of coffee and my laptop, and step outside and work in the fresh outdoors without a major upheaval in my daily routine. I'm spoiled   I used to have a large deck before I moved here.  I  practically LIVED there during the summer!

I tried to take my laptop outside to work one day last week.  I took my cart that I use for grocery shopping and I loaded my folding chair, my folding tablemate, my laptop with cord, external mouse and mousepad (I hate using the fingertip mouse on the laptop), a sun hat for the hot sun, a jacket if it got too breezy, a can of juice if I got thirsty, then I got my keys, locked the apartment and pushed my overloaded cart to the elevator to take me up to the 12th floor public deck. There were a few people there but they were friendly so I chose the opposite corner of the deck and proceeded to unload my "work area".  There was plenty of room for all of us! Within ten minutes of setting up, I realized that the two solid walls of the deck trapped the sun's heat in, but kept the breeze out. I was sweltering and the computer was heating up.  This was not going to work.

I refolded everything, repacked my cart and took the elevator to the ground floor. Pushing the heavy cart through several heavy doors, I finally arrived in our beautiful courtyard. I unpacked everything and set up my work area again and started on my computer.  The beautiful flowering fruit trees offered shade from the sun's warm rays but the breeze had free range here. I think it had even picked up  in the last half hour. I donned my jacket but it failed to ward off the chill. Then my laptop ran out of power.  I moved closer to the gazebo and plugged it in, but the outlet there was shut off. By now, I was  too cold to be productive anyway.

 I refolded the chair and the table, repacked the computer and all its appendages, packed everything back into the cart and pushed it through those heavy doors to the elevator to go back up to my 4th floor apartment where I unpacked everything again. By the time I got everything into its proper place I was too played out to work anymore. The whole day yielded two paragraphs of writing plus my total exhaustion!

Now if I had my own private deck, I could have gone there in my PJ's and written a whole book by now and I wouldn't be feeling half as tired!  I MISS MY DECK!