Sounds Like Progress To Me

It's 1:30 a.m. No, there's no sick baby to be rocking to sleep, no sleepwalker stomping around to disturb the quiet summer night. The AC works fine, we're all comfy cozy even though it's still about 90 degrees outside. I even turned the thermostat down for awhile, and bundled up in blankets, to keep the AC blasting, trying to drown out the noise outside.

I just can't sleep with ear plugs, so I ran the dishwasher, and mine is pretty loud, but to no avail. Did a load of laundry, which is right outside my bedroom door, and still that incessant whine drowns out all my attempts at peaceful sleep.

So I called the hotel out behind our subdivision. Not directly behind my house, but one of their parking lots is, and that's the problem. A truck, one of those tractor trailers, parked right outside my bedroom window, with the engine running, only it sounds like a VERY LOUD REFRIDGERATOR. You know that high pitched whine when it's trying to get cold after the door was left open too long? This one doesn't even take a breather, it's just boring a hole in my skull while I toss and turn.

Don't think I'm just lying around taking it. No, after a few calls to the hotel and finally the local police, I happily waved bye bye as the truck moved away. Back through the parking lot, back toward the hotel (and their paying guests? I think not), then swinging around, back behind the strip mall, that even though it is a little further away, is still DIRECTLY BEHIND MY BEDROOM WINDOWS.

So, now, instead of a mere 50 feet from my back fence (and it's not a really big yard to start with) it's about 500 feet ... that's being generous. And now we have the benefit of the backdrop, said strip mall, to bounce the sound DIRECTLY at my window.

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But this is what our fine village calls Progress, or more precisely Economic Development, which is always A Good Thing, right Martha? Before my house was here, this was just a useless little cornfield. But the Great Developer filled it in with many houses. And after we moved in, there was still a useless little cornfield behind us, to buffer the street noise. (Oh, so it wasn't so useless after all?) Well, all in the name of Economic Development, a strip mall was built, and then the hotel. We watched the slow construction, we endured the heavy equipment showing up at the crack of dawn. We still have a fairly regular wake-up call by a couple of Really Big Trucks that show up at dawn to move that last pile of dirt around, moving ever closer to the fence. I'm sure one morning I'll wake up to them actually dumping the whole dang thing in my back yard. At least then I'll know they're done.

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OK, I have to get up in 4 hours, so I guess I'll take another stab at those ear plugs ... and I'm glad at least one truck driver out there will have a good night's sleep in his cozy hotel room far from his noisy truck engine.