Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances.
William Powell
Before I started working from my home, I never noticed the almost incessant noise and clamour that goes on around my apartment building during the day. I am a quiet person. I prefer silence when I work, and during most other activities around home. My neighbours are generally pretty quiet people too, which is nice. And, since the landlord fixed an astonishingly noisy plumbing problem (imagine the sound of God blowing his nose...a deep, booming brrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaPPPPP that frequently woke me from a deep sleep in the middle of the night), the building itself is quiet enough by any standards.
It wasn't too bad in the winter here either. Except for the frequent snow ploughs, which are annoying enough, because they usually get started around five in the morning.
But during the nicer weather, it sometimes seems that there isn't a minute that isn't spoiled by some kind of hideous racket outside. The lawnmowers and the gas-powered edge trimmers and the leaf-blowers. Add to those the seemingly constant exterior renovations going on, necessitating the use of brick saws, hammers, sand-blasting equipment, noisy trucks constantly backing up with their beep-beep-beeps or simply idling with the engines running outside my office window.
The buses go by every five minutes or so and their noise echoes off the building next to mine. They also create a weird, melodic whistling sound which mystifies me. There's a fire station just down the street, and as often as it seems to come into my driveway, the sirens still blare up and down till they're too far away to hear anymore. There are occasional police cars and ambulances too. Not to mention the loud-talkers who stand outside yapping their heads off, oblivious to the fact that someone's probably sitting near the window they're talking next to, listening (quite unwillingly) to every word they say. Have you ever realized how little of any value is said during quick conversations with your neighbours in the yard?
And the dogs. Oh my god, the dogs. I love dogs, okay? I adore them. But keep them quiet, dammit. There are so many people in these two apartment buildings who are constantly walking their dogs out on the grass (it's a toilet out there folks...stay off the grass around my place). And it seems that most of those people have no clue as to how to keep their dogs quiet.
I almost forgot about the car alarms. There is a special level of Hell reserved for people who have over-sensitive car alarms. And if they allow those car alarms to go off in the middle of the night...if those alarms go off every half hour during the middle of the night...if those alarms go off every half hour, every night for a week...well, then whoever owns that car will have to wait for their trip down to meet Beelzebub because I'm going to spend a little time with him first, and he'll look forward to the trip downstairs before I'm through with him. That's how car alarms make me feel, anyway.
I can't really complain about the sirens. They're just doing their jobs, helping people. And most of the traffic noise just fades into the background most of the time. I'm a lifelong city girl. You get used to it.
What bothers me the most, and what would, in its absence, make all the other noises tolerable (except the car alarms), is the constant noise created by the work going on outside here all the time. The lawnmowing, grass-trimming, leaf-blowing, brick-sawing, hammering, trucks idling god-forsaken DIN it all creates just drives me completely to distraction and makes me want to go out there with a baseball bat and shower down destruction on every bloody noisy contraption I can see.
I'm convinced that the guys who operate the gas-powered grass trimmers and leaf blowers really, really enjoy their toys. The way they rev the engines constantly rrr-rrrr--RRRRRR-rrr-rrr over and over and over again. What's up with that shit? I mean really! Just do the damn job and go away, already. Don't stand there wailing on the throttle like you're some idiot in a hot rod trying to impress some hot chick on the street corner. You know what kind of chicks are impressed by that kind of behavior, and you deserve anything you catch with that bait. And I do mean "catch."
I keep wanting to complain to the landlord, but I just know what he's going to say. It's work that needs to be done. Yeah. He's right. I know it. The place needs to be maintained. And it's just because I'm home all the time now that has made me so aware of all the daytime noise.
I just don't see why we can't just leave the edges a little rough, and let the leaves lie where they fall or rake them up. Seriously...leaf-blowing cannot be any more efficient than raking. Probably less so. Get a damn rake.
If I wasn't so averse to doing my own lawnmowing and snow-shovelling, I'd move to a little cottage in the middle of a cow pasture where the only noise I have to listen to is cows and birds and the occasional tractor in the distance. That sounds like heaven to me.
In the meantime, I just want some peace and quiet!!
