Archives for 2006

1. OMG! As I sit here writing this post on Wednesday afternoon I’m slowly being driven crazy by the “karaoke” neighbors that living the adjoining house next door.

2. No, they aren’t Karaoking, thank goodness ’cause that’s bad enough. No, they’ve been playing some gawd awful instruments in the last few days though. ALL DAY.

3. Last year the son brought home a Tuba. Yeah a tuba. Probably due to a music class at school. Well I think he brought one home from school, but I’m starting to wonder if his parents and or uncle just went out and bought it for him because I’ve heard it a few times in the last month or so, including today.

4. I think I might start screaming soon. Most of this week I’ve been hearing bad electric guitar. It starts around 8 in the morning. Then the music stops around oh noon or so and I get to listen to some vacuuming or perhaps floor hockey. Whatever they are doing at that time they hit the walls a lot. Vroom vroom bang, clunk, bang. This is usually accompanied by loud singing.

5. Now, if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you probably know that I don’t sleep very much because of my abdominal pain (Crohns), and I am in fact awake most of the night. Lately I’ve been going to bed sometime between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., and I sleep until perhaps 11 a.m. but thanks to my neighbors I really haven’t been getting that tiny bit of sleep lately at all.

6. If the guitar playing was half decent I might not mind it so much, but I’d still probably want them to turn it down a bit. However they are playing pretty much full blast through an amplifier in their basement or living room. I haven’t quite pinpointed where the sound is originating, but it doesn’t really matter because I can hear it from the bedroom upstairs, the main floor of my house and even in my basement.

7. One word of advice for anyone out there learning guitar. Don’t plug your electric guitar into an amplifier while you are still learning a song and playing it over and over again. Especially if you are not catching on very well. You can play it unplugged and still hear it. When you do get good enough at the song and want to hear it properly, don’t blast it – you still might not be as good as you think you are.

8. Honestly – don’t do it, this is why neighbors kill each other.

9. Sometime between two and three each afternoon the music starts up again. Usually it’s bad guitar played very loudly. The same one or two songs or parts of songs over and over again.

10. Today it’s something else. I haven’t quite decided if they are playing an accordion – badly, or perhaps a keyboard that sounds a lot like an accordion. It sounds like they are attempting to play very bad polka music on it. That’s how bad it is- I can’t tell which instrument it really is! Help me!

11. This is at least twenty times worse than the poorly played electric guitar, and 10 times worse than the foghorn tuba. Speaking of the tuba. They haven’t mastered any form of song on that yet. It’s just notes, often the same off key note over and over again. Luckily the longest they usually play this is about 30 minutes.

12. You can imagine how irritating this might be if I was healthy, and if I was getting a good sleep each night, but it’s almost unbearably irritating when you’ve only had three hours sleep and you are in pain and are feverish. On top of that, my husband is an amazing musician. He plays 16+ instruments and sings too. I’ve developed quite a fine ear for music and this only increases the “quit now while you are still lucky to be alive” factor of this irritating new hobby of our neighbors.

13. We’ve talked to our neighbors about their loud karaoking before, asked them to perhaps turn their speakers so that they don’t face our house, and they did for a while. Don’t get me wrong they are nice enough people and generally co-operative, but they forget after a while and start up again. Now I suppose we’ll have to talk to them about they’re musical instrument playing. Oh, how to do that tactfully? I don’t think it’s possible. A couple of years ago, when we were renovating our living room dining room area (still a work in progress), we even built a floating sound proof wall on the side that adjoins their house. It helps to some degree but not enough.

One thing that I do know – The next house that we purchase will not be a semi-attached-detached. No way! I’d actually love to buy their house someday and turn this into a nice sized house. Now that would be nice.

I’m playing music now too- at a moderate volume. Rob Zombie anyone? Or Perhaps some Black Sabbath?

Fairies wear boots,

Oh ya got ta believe me.

I saw it, I saw it,

With my own two eyes.

Happy Thursday!