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I found a little yellow sheet of paper tucked neatly under my door as I came home from work this afternoon. As I mentioned before, our downstairs neighbor is unhappy with the amount of noise we are making. Apparently, we are now making too much noise by walking around in “an aggressive manner”. Playing the piano early in the morning, this I can understand complaining about. But now our footsteps are too loud? I completely understand how terrible it is to be woken up by your neighbors excessive noise. But when you think your neighbors are walking around too loudly, then, my friends, I think you need to chill out just a little bit.

Observe (spelling mistakes are my neighbor’s):

Dear Neighbors,

You seem to be unaware of the fact that the floor of your apartment is very squeaky in a very loud way, and that it is very thin as well.

I admire your dicipline and that you wake up every morning at 7am also on weekends. I am asking you in this letter to be concederate and allow allow me to have a couple more hours of sleep (I desperatly need it).

I realize that you have no control of the state of your floor. However, you can walk around a bit less in the bedroom above mine, and in a less aggressive manner.

I would appreciate it very much!

I will say this, though. I appreciate the very polite way in which they asked me to be quiet. Although I’m not sure how I’m going to be really quiet just walking around in my apartment (especially when I’ve just woken up and am not thinking straight yet) , I suppose I can avoid jumping around or something. Still, I’ve never had anyone complain about how loudly I walk around before. Guess there’s a first time for everything.

We got a notice from the apartment managers today stating that one of our neighbors complained that we were making too much noise this morning.  I could go on for quite a while on how ridiculous it is for someone to complain about us making noise as I am almost always the one who has to complain about someone else.  What makes this instance really annoying is that they were complaining about my wife’s piano playing this morning around 8am.  I can understand on one hand that it probably woke them up since most college students are in bed late and out of bed late.  However, she played with the damper pedal down the entire time and she really didn’t play very loudly at all.

But here is where we get to the real problem of our apartment.  The insulation here is terrible.  Completely atrocious.  Whenever our upstairs neighbors walk around we hear their footsteps.  When they have a conversation, we hear their voices.  When they have a loud party until 3am, yeah, we hear that too.  So I am sure that even though my wife was playing pretty quiet even that sound carried through very well to our downstairs neighbors, waking them up and prompting them to file a complaint with the management.  This is why I hate living in an apartment that is on the second floor in the middle of the building.  We have neighbors above, below, and beside us meaning that every time I play my music I am serenading three different tenants.  Makes me miss my apartment in Miami.  I was on the first floor with neighbors on 2 sides and above me, but the construction was newer and I never heard anything nor did anyone complain about my music.  If only I had a couple hundred grand lying around, then I’d just go out and buy a house and play my music as loud as I wanted to (or really as loud as my wife could stand it).

Smarmy is my new favorite word.  Not for its definition (excessively or unctuously flattering, ingratiating, servile), but because it popped into my head the other day and its fun to say.  Smarmy.

oooh, and don’t forget you can be smarmier than someone or even the smarmiest around!

I was in some sort of contest in which I could win a Dodge Viper if I could race to be the first one to the car.  It was dark, and I ran really hard to make it, and jumped in the car.  I thought I was the first one there and was feeling incredible, but then I saw that someone else had jumped in the car at around the same time.  We both thought that we were the ones who had won the car, and so began arguing with each other.  The contest judges (who were wearing orange t-shirts and reminded me of the S.O.S tour guide people at UCA) came up and I thought they were going to settle the argument and say that I had indeed won the car.  Instead, they told us that the whole thing was a joke and that neither of us had won the car and that we needed to get out.   I was sitting in the drivers seat at this time, and I looked over at the other guy in the car with me.  We shared some sort of look and it just seemed logical that we should quickly shut the doors and drive off anyways because it was only fair that we should get the car at this point.   So we slam the car doors, I start the engine and we drive off while the orange shirt people are yelling at us.

There is a break in my dream, and the next thing I know, it is now this guy, me, and my wife who are driving in the car.  It turns out that it was a good thing I was driving because the other contest “winner” tells me that he can’t drive a stick, and of course I can.  We are driving on a very wide road and it is half dark.   I can’t pinpoint the exact location we are driving.  It looks in my dream just like a big interstate highway, but I have the feeling during my dream that we are not in the U.S anymore.  After driving around a bit, I am getting tired of having this strange guy in the car with me, and so I stop suddenly and throw him out of the car and my wife and I drive on.

At this point, things start to get stranger.  my wife and I are driving along still and we suddenly come to the end of the road.  The road, though, is suspending up very high, not on a bridge, but just like those areas on the highway where the road has to go over other roads and so may be hundreds of feet up in the air.  There are two buildings at the end of this road, and they are also suspended quite high in the air.  We stop the car, get out, and walk inside of the building on the right.  There is a man standing there and asks if we are ready to check in the car.  I say yes, hand him the keys and he says I won’t be in any trouble because I drove the car here and also because I really didn’t speed any in the car.

We walk into this building, but quickly become lost.  The building is very old, and even though it seems to be some sort of office building, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how the place is laid out.  We keep climbing stairs to find a way out, but we just keep getting more lost.  We finally reach the top floor, and it is here that I start getting really scared.  The top of the building is extremely high up, and the top floor is at a sort of an angle, which makes me think that this is not the most stable of buildings.  What scares me, though, is the fact that there are many door ways on this top floor, but no doors.  If I were to stumble at all, I would easily fall out of this doorway to my doom.  Suddenly many members of my immediate family, and my Uncle are there.  This makes me even more scared because my youngest brother is on a skateboard and flying around the room not seeming to care about the deadly open door.  This goes on for a while, until I finally yell at him to just please stop riding that thing around and stay still so he doesn’t kill himself.

The next thing I know, all my family members have disappeared and my wife and I are again looking for a way out of this building.  We finally meet someone else who tells us to head down a stairway I hadn’t previously seen, and we will find a walkway to the other building, where we will then find a way out of the place.  We walk down these stairs only to find that, while they do lead to the next building, the walkway is very narrow and it is easy to fall off of this.  I am getting really terrified at this point (even though I’m not really afraid of heights in real life), but we start to walk across anyways.  Halfway there, we run in into a young Japanese girl who is standing half on the railing looking like she is ready to commit suicide.  I am so scared and just want to make it to the other side, that I yell at her to hurry up and jump so we can pass.  So she jumps, and we finally get to the other side.

And then I wake up, still feeling scared.

I realized today that I am getting back into my bad habit of working a lot and neglecting my other interests.  I am working quite a bit, but I still have enough time to accomplish some of the things I want done if only I forced myself to actually do them.  Monday through Friday I am at work by 10:30am, get a break from 3 to 4:15pm and then work until around 9:30 or so.  Well, with the exception of getting Thursday night off.  This is a bit of working, but I tend to use this as an excuse to not do anything when I am home and not working.  Gotta put a stop to that as soon as possible.

And one other thing I noticed this evening was that I haven’t been listening to much music lately.  As a matter of fact, I’ve hardly listened to music at all since I’ve started working so much.  I always had music on in the past and I wonder why I’ve let myself stop this so suddenly.  Is it because I’m using Ubuntu all the time and I don’t have my trusty Foobar around, or is it simply because I find myself tired and somewhat depressed often?  Good questions to ask myself, but for now I think I’ll just put on some Sibelius and aimlessly browse the intertubes.