Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In the middle of the day the neighbours turned up their stereo loud enough that I could hear the bass over the television news I was watching. I cranked up my stereo to cover it (it's not as irritating when it's my own choice of music and I can hear more than distorted/muffled bass and kick drum). In the evening, a car stereo (parked) was loud enough to hear over the television (note that the television is not in a front room). I leaned out the window, and when the driver looked up and saw me, he turned his stereo down and even shouted an apology (I had stormed out of my house to bitch about too-loud bass in his van once before). As soon as he did that, I started hearing thumping from the back of my house -- I think it's a club or something on the next block south and about a block east, 'cause I've heard loud music from that direction before, but it's usually when the weather is warm. I just had to put up with that for half an hour.

Just before midnight I started hearing annoying, distracting thumping again, but I couldn't get a direction on it. And when I got out of bed to investigate, it stopped. It was subtle enough to not be sure what I was hearing, but not subtle enough to be able to ignore with my head and my hearing being in the states they're in. After a few rounds of that, I finally managed to get up while it was still going, and figured out where it was coming from.

My basement. The low frequencies from the flame in the oil burner in my furnace. Ouch. (I should have guessed that as soon as I noticed I was having trouble telling the direction.)

Turning that off completely could get a wee bit chilly by sunup, but between fibromyalgia-related hyperacute hearing being a problem today, and a serious migraine (to the point of inducing nausea) -- a double-whammy hearing-wise, I couldn't stand to keep hearing it. So I turned the thermostat down a few more degrees, but the furnace wouldn't shut off. I went to the basement to check on it, and the temperature gauge on the furnace (it's hot water heat) said it was still cold. The big pipe coming off the top was hot, but the smaller pipes leading from the big pipe to the radiators were cold. So I figured I must have an air bubble impeding flow or something (izzat a reasonable guess?) and went around the house bleeding all the radiators (and turning off the power strip feeding both Ethernet hubs in the process -- whoops). I also turned the thermostat all the way down, and after the furnace finally responded to that, I turned it back up to several degrees colder than where it was set when I started, hoping to hit a compromise between too cold to be willing to walk to the bathroom in the morning, and being kept awake by the not-quite-subtle-enough roar of the oil flame two floors away.

I hope my hearing is back to normal in the morning. I don't really need to be hearing trucks on MLK from the far side of Union Square (uh, about a dozen blocks??), when half of US Route 1 (Fulton st.) is only a few doors away, y'know? (Yes, really, I just heard a truck in the direction of MLK Blvd. that was going too fast to have been anywhere between here and there. No, it wasn't loud enough to really matter -- it only really registered because I was trying to figure out just how sensitive my hearing is at the moment it passed. And I can't hear cars or slower trucks that far away, just that particularly loud/fast one (it may have been a fire truck not using its siren, from the sound of the motor).) I'm not looking forward to the #2 bus with the bad exaust system that'll come down Lombard st. in the morning. Fortunately, Fulton st. is unusually quiet right now.

Okay, I've whined enough and the cooling fans of my computers are starting to hurt my ears. Time to try again with that sleeping thing.

My good earplugs aren't comfortable enough to wear sleeping, and probably won't cut enough of the really low frequencies. (They're not that good -- they're not custom fitted or anything. They're "Sonic II"s, and I think they were designed for shooters.) I wonder whether I still have any of the cheap squishy foam ones around here.