The devil is in the details

I love the sound of jackhammers in the morning

I love my apartment. Really, I do. It is enormous, it is in a great location that is safe, walking distance to the lab, walking distance to all sorts of interesting places and right by the T, and it is DIRT CHEAP for both its size and location. Lately, I've not really been feeling the love.

The building has six units. Technically they are condos and we rent the condo from its owner, not from the building or something like that. Our landlord is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Anyway, the other five units have been occupied by young-ish families as long as I have lived here (since June '03), until recently when the people above us moved in. The people above us are a group of three BU undergrads.

I haven't figured it out yet, but they do something strange in the room above mine. The noise is a general pounding noise, but the rhythm is strange and eliminates most of the usual explanations. At first we thought they had a band and the noise was reverberations from the drum. This weekend the noise got MUCH louder and seemed to more clearly sound like feet stomping. When I say much louder, I mean that it was making the the windows in my room shake. Again there was an odd and distinctive rhythm, which makes the whole thing puzzling. It basically goes "bump-bump-badump-bump" over and over and over again. Our new thought is that they are very enthusiastically playing some game with a pad that you jump on, somewhat like "Dance, Dance Revolution." The noise can really only be explained by foot stomping. It is obviously foot stomping. Except....it went on for 12 hours straight both days this weekend. How does someone have enough ENERGY to stomp that loudly for 12 hours straight???

Between the stomping and the lack of heat, I'm really unexcited. (For those of you not up on the heat situation, our heat IS on. Sort of. The past two winters that we have lived here, the apartment has been a sauna from around October 1-at least April. For some reason, possibly relating to the new ownership of the building in general or heating costs, the radiators don't kick on very often this year. We haven't figured out a pattern yet, but we know it sure isn't the all-heat-all-the-time method of last year. The pattern mostly seems to be that the radiators come on when we pick up the phone and are ready to call and make a stink about it. It hasn't been quite so cold of late, so it's sort of okay, but once it really gets wintery we will be having some issues. For now, I just use lots of blankets.)

All of this is not a huge deal (in fact, I only bring up the radiators because I am cold). The real reason that I was ready to move today was that I was brutally awakened by the sound of two jackhammers this morning. Grrrrrr. Apparently there was a "Brookline water emergency" that could only be fixed by jackhammering DIRECTLY OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW early this morning. Booooo. I suppose I believe them about this faux "water emergency" a little more since the street was still closed when I came home from work today (in fact, they tried to stop me from going home, saying I wasn't allowed to walk up the sidewalk on this side of the street) and they seemed to be shoveling dirt into a hole in the middle of the road directly outside of my bedroom window.

The only good thing about jackhammers? It is impossible to hear stomping over them.

Your other positive thought for the evening: apparently blog complaining about the heat also works, because the radiator just kicked on.

posted by Immunegirl @ 11:15 PM