I didn’t have to go far to sketch this. This is apartment complex where I live in Davis, though not this block. They just recently got a makeover from being white and grey, and now some blocks are green, some blue. Mine’s blue. I sat out on the central green to sketch this, and listened to a history podcast on my iPod. I’ve lived in this complex for, oh blimey, over six years now, in two different (but eerily similar) apartments. We do want to move. Our upstairs neighbour gets up very early (like 4 in the morning) and her floorboards are very, very creeky, and her shower very noisy. One of the other adjoining neighbours appears to turn on their shower (also very noisy) about thirty times a night, on, then off, then on, then off, every night. A previous resident upstairs used to walk around in ski boots, it seemed, while one former neighbour opposite used to vacuum at one o clock in the morning every night with their front door open, because well that wouldn’t disturb anyone. My favourite former neighbour was a guy who lived downstairs from our old place, really nice guy, he used to sing at the top of his voice all the time, even walking down the street, and he was a good singer too, I was honestly sad when he left. Not all neighbourhood sounds are so pleasant. Car alarms – for some reason people still have super sensitive car alarms and think they somehow don’t annoy people. As a society we no longer associate car alarms with actual car thieves; we have reached the stage where people hear alarms and think, I really hope someone is stealing that car because then the annoying alarm will go somewhere else. One alarm last year kept going off day and night, untended by its owners, keeping us and most of the other residents awake, to the point where we had to report it to the police. We were surprised when a nice officer showed up, and he investigated the errant alarm. He was quite the detective too, because he shortly came back to tell us he had identified the culprit: a peach tree. I walked out to the parking lot with him, and we did an experiment: I shook the tree, a peach fell, and bam – the alarm went off. Case solved. I tried to think of a witty joke that could work in peaches and breaches of the peace, but came up with nothing (couldn’t even get an impeachment joke in there). Shame it wasn’t an orange tree, I thought later, because it could have gone to a peel. Anyway, the cop, who was very friendly, went back to the station looking pleased to have solved this riddle, and the apartment managers took the possibly unnecessary step of cutting the offending tree down (you know, it wasn’t the tree that had its alarm switched on). Anyway, such is life in an otherwise quiet, neighbourhood apartment complex. Now, I think I’ll get my son some drums for his birthday…

Incidentally, the peach tree would have been in this picture, had it not been cut down, just to the right of the carport on the left. Good job; it may have spoiled the view.