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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

The Ants Go Marching

Or someone does.

I've been married close to 25 years now. Our first apartment was on the bottom floor of a three-story building. We would occasionally hear little footsteps running above us. And, sometimes, we would poke the ceiling with a broom handle to let them know it was time to settle the kids. But I don't remember it being all that loud, on the whole.

Then we bought a house so noise wasn't really an issue.

More recently, we rented an apartment in Vancouver. (The U.S. one. Oh? You didn't know the U.S. had a Vancouver? Well, look it up.) The building was built in 1945 and features squeaky hardwood floors throughout. Again, we were on the bottom floor and we could hear the guy upstairs when he got home. We just turned up the volume on the TV - not a big deal.

Our next apartment was next to the Columbia River. Unfortunately, it was also next to two airports, the railroad tracks, a freeway, and major trucking operations. That apartment was loud but, I have to say, we didn't hear the neighbors much (unless it was warm enough to open the windows and someone's cat got loose).

Our current location is a mother-in-law apartment in a nice home in a swanky neighborhood. In 25 years, this is the loudest place I've ever lived - neighbor-wise. I'd like to mention here that we just got back from vacationing in a place where the houses are packed so tight you could literally (and I mean that in the literal sense of the word) borrow a cup of sugar by reaching through the window. No room for grass here - just house, pathway, house. Okay, it might have been low season but the only time we heard the neighbors is when one of them decided it was time to pressure wash his deck. (On average, the birds were considerably louder than the neighbors.)

Our current upstairs neighbor-slash-landlord is freakishly loud. The first week we moved in, they refinished their hardwood floors. Okay, we thought, that's not likely to reoccur. But the following week they discovered there had been some sort of plumbing leak that required them to jackhammer the tile flooring out as well. Okay, we thought, what's one more week?

Now that the floors are done, it seems their obsession is rearranging furniture and/or Morris dancing. (Note to self: maybe we should quit renting on the bottom floor.) Seriously, I don't know what they're doing up there. There's just two of them but it sounds like a herd of elephants up there. (That would be figuratively, not literally, as I've never heard a herd before. Overhead or otherwise.) Last night, it sounded like they were building furniture or something.

But just to make things fun, we also have ants - as of yesterday. Actually, I don't know how long we've had them; we've been out of town a while. We just got done (hopefully) battling ants at our "real" house and we had them on this latest vacation too (which was made considerably worse when one of the kiddies spilled juice in his backpack which wasn't discovered until the following morning). What's going on here?

Yesterday, we got to our "other place" and found more freaking ants.

It could be worse. These are the teeny tiny ones - I'll smush them with my finger. I don't think I would even touch another bug (unless my grandson asked me to. . . okay, maybe not even then). In fact, I couldn't handle the freaking butterfly room at the museum. I just thought they were all hairy moths with wings. No, thank you.

Do you think I could just take a nap and it will all go away? Probably not. There's too much marching: Marching upstairs. Marching downstairs.

(TV series?)

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