So perhaps you’ve noticed that over the past couple of months I’ve pretty much stopped posting on Fridays altogether. One of the reasons for this is that Fridays and Saturdays are pretty much the worst days to be in my apartment - inevitably, the crazy woman who lives in the apartment next door has a party and there’s god-awful music audible in our apartment until about 4 or 5am. Keep in mind that audible music in this case refers to music that is loud enough that even with earplugs and several fans going for extra background noise, I am unable to sleep through it. And as for its effect on my posting - it unfortunately works out that only a single poorly constructed wall separates my little home office from all of this crap next door, so that room is the first one we abandon when the music starts. (When it’s the people in the apartment downstairs that are having a party, our bedroom and living room suffer most.)

Believe me, I would have told you about all this before if it had been going on during all the time I’ve been living here (nearly a year now). But for some reason we can’t explain, it’s gotten exponentially worse over the past couple of months. It used to be that we’d go weeks or months at a time without hearing anything at all, and even then they’d turn it off by eleven or twelve. Now we have three or four nights a week like this, and as you can imagine, we’re not thrilled. It’s considered a good night if we can’t hear anything once the earplugs are in, because then at least we can do everything we normally would except watch tv. But that’s why we’re moving, so it’s just a matter of putting up with everything for another three weeks.

We’re not planning on going quietly, by the way. Right now we never fight back with our own music because we don’t think it’s worth it to antagonize people who have such control over our sleeping habits, crazy and inconsiderate though they may be. But we don’t have a lot to lose once it’s our last couple of days here, so we’re planning on moving Chris’s enormous speakers into my room and playing metal or industrial very, very loudly. It’s perfectly legal to play loud music between 8am and 11pm, so we think we’ll do just that. Especially if it’s 8am on a morning after our neighbors have been up till 5 having a party. (Hee, hee.)