The curse of suburbia

I live in the burbs, always have and probably always will, truth to tell. For the most part, it's not as bad a place to live as the intelligentsia would have us believe, provided it's approached with right attitude and a good set of neighbours. Growing up, I was pretty lucky. We only ever had one bad lot, the ones who would call the police to get our games of street cricket moved on, the ones we used to collect dog poo to leave on their doorstep, that sort of relationship. My new flat, well, things are a little different.

For the more part, I put up with my noisy immediate neighbour. I don't think he has any idea of just how loud he is, to be honest, and the elderly downstairs neighbours are probably too deaf to notice. As long as he keeps to a dull roar, I can usually deal with him. And his music. And his excessively loud-talking friends. And his stomping up and down the stairs at all hours. It's fine. You get that when you live in flats. I don't like it, but I deal with it. The problem neighbour here, I've never actually seen them; they're not an immediate neighbour, there's a house between them and me. But oh my god have I heard them.

They have a dog. I think it must be a puppy. Again, never seen, only heard. Because they don't tell it to shut up when it sets up with continuous barking at night. All night. It sets off all the yappy neighbourhood dogs. I'm guessing that they're telling it to shut up and let them get some sleep. I know one day I will be out on my balcony telling it that, if this keeps up. That was last night. Today, worse, if anything. It seems that the return of good weather has brought out the lawn mowers. Fair enough, I have no objection to mowing the lawn. It has to be done, and I'd rather they did that and kept the seeds under control so they don't make me sneeze. They did it this morning. Then, based on the sound of things, they did it again this afternoon. Then they had some sort of motorised thing going that I can only assume was doing the edges. Except they must have really sucked at using it, because they did it again. And then again. And once more. Then just once more, because they'd obviously missed a bit. In all, I think they fired it up about 6 times. And each time they did, I couldn't hear anything that I had going on in my flat. No music, no TV, no thinking. And I need to think. Because I'm still writing a thesis here.

In fact, they're out there again. I think they must have moved to the front of their house, because it's a bit fainter. It's not drowning out the sound of trams or traffic, birds, my stereo, my brain. It's just sounding a little like a dentist's drill now.

They clearly don't realise the risk they're taking. I've been studying for days straight, only moving away from the laptop to get on the wii fit and work out some of the kinks - I swear, if it wasn't for all the crap I eat while studying, I'd be fit as by the time this is done. But crap I am eating, drinking, inhaling. It's so bad, I actually craved vegetables last night. I'm hopped up on a combination of sugar and caffeine that I'm sure could trigger a heart attack in a lesser mortal. And now there's people messing with me. I'm hoping that either I get the thesis finished (pfft, like that's going to happen this side of 3am) or they turn off the bloody whipper snipper. Otherwise, I've got a fairly good idea that a local medical team will be performing a gardening tool extraction procedure later today, and it won't be from me. It's taken all my self-restraint not to litter this post with swear words. Don't think I've got enough left to deal with much more.