I hate Memorial Day.
That’s not actually true. I hate Memorial Day weekend. All the yard sales draw people into the neighborhood. Even that isn’t a big deal, but the sheer numbers of people are a nuisance.
It’s hard to walk the dog. People aren’t paying attention to the road while they’re driving. They’re looking for signs, and at the goods splayed out in presentations on front lawns, driveways, and inside garages.
Which means they’re driving poorly in the first place, and thankfully slowly for the most part. Where this becomes an issue is if you’re trying to cross a street with a pup that loves everyone and is equally intrigued by all the nifty colorful stuff being displayed.
God help you if someone is selling dog toys!
In short there’s chaos. People parking in the streets, others trying to go about their business and attempting to navigate around various cars and people wandering around like they’re at a mall.
Walking a dog in all of this is a pain. What’s worse is that there are traffic jams and at every street crossing the wait for a break in traffic is a long one.
So it’s with blazing sun and an impatient pup that you wait, and wait, and wait before it’s safe to cross.
That’s annoying.
Add to that a neighbor across the street screaming and cursing about dogs in the neighborhood doing their jobs; barking at strangers and thinking they’re protecting their owner’s homes or possessions which from their perspective are inexplicably on the front lawn. My stress level starts climbing and I realize I don’t want another summer of this guy adding to the noise.
Several months ago, the crazy lady was apparently hauled off to the booby hatch. Approximately a month prior to that, all of the 20+ Chihuahuas she was keeping were sent to good homes, or the pound. The limit is 4 dogs per household how the hell she had 20+ dogs is beyond me. Well, not entirely. She refused to have any of them fixed. So reproduction being what it is…
It does explain why the dogs exhibited pack behavior and why they were so damn loud all the time.
For a blissful few months, there was no cacophony of noise coming from her place. A new neighbor moved in with 2 huskies who “sing” the world into existence about 7:30am. Sometimes Jesse joins in the chorus for one or two howls, then he’s bored and comes in to check on me.
Lately, he just ignores their morning serenade.
For the last two weeks a next door neighbor has been host to a lady friend and what I presume to be her daughter. That’s his business and I certainly don’t care. Except that the daughter isn’t all there.
Oddly she exhibits the same behavior that “Crazy Pants” across the street did. Equally strange is that her voice is almost exactly a match for “Crazy Pants”.
The voice alone is triggering, but now that voice and nonsensical sounds, singing, yelling, screaming, chittering like a monkey, and all the rest, sounds like she’s in my damn living room.
Even Jesse has taken to laying in the front bedroom just to be as far away from the source of the sound as possible.
Why do these people have only one volume? Loud! This defective human must be seen, and acknowledged otherwise she raises her voice to impossible levels until she is acknowledged. It’s tiresome, and while you’d think, “just be nice,” that’s never enough.
She must be spoken to, and you know what? Sometimes I don’t feel like having an inane conversation first thing in the morning. I sure as hell don’t want to have the same conversation each and every time I set foot on the back deck.
I’m becoming that old guy that is grumpy all the damn time. I’m fighting it, but it’s a losing battle.
For the past week I’ve been working on coursework to obtain a certification in a bid to make me more marketable to potential employers. It’s not been that difficult but it does require concentration.
Especially since midway through the course the bit of software I was learning was so dissimilar from the course materials being presented, that each lab required 20 minutes of hunting and pecking to find the control element the course material said I should see on a particular page. The software in question has changed radically since the course work was developed.
As you might imagine this added a level of frustration. To make matters worse, the differences multiplied three fold by the time I got to the end of the course.
The end was in sight, and the certificate was just out of reach.The first three modules, I scored between 93 and 100 on the module exam. By the fourth and final exam, I scored an 88. DAMN!!!!!
Starting to see the problem? My general frustration level was increasing on a number of fronts at the same time.
There are a couple more certifications I want to get including one from an international organization for testing professionals. That’s a $250 course and I think I’m going to need absolute concentration to learn the material and pass that final.
Thankfully, I didn’t start that one at the same time because the random screams and badly imitated birdcalls apparently coming from my living room would certainly have annoyed me to the point of becoming a real asshole!
Yesterday evening, I literally couldn’t watch a movie without having the volume at “Sonic Boom” levels. Since the movie had gunfire and explosions the situation was untenable, even with the doors and windows closed. So I gave up and spent more time “exploring” the piece of software that has been giving me difficulty, outside the coursework assignments.
To add another cramp in my style: I like working on the deck in the early morning. It’s quite nice to enjoy the morning cool, with a cup of coffee, my computer, the birds singing in the trees, and my dog watching the world while curled up at my feet. He likes the morning “watch” and really likes our time together in the morning sun.
Right up until “HELLO SIR! HELLO SIR! UH HELLO SIR!!!!” The last, at a level that rivals a Saturn rocket taking off.
I feel like MurderBot. My internal dialogue is something like, “Maybe if I don’t answer she’ll go away. Uhhh nope, she really feels if she talks others are obligated to respond. Can’t she see that I’m working? Why can’t she leave me alone? What would she do if I was mute? I need to go check the perimeter. I wonder if she would leave me alone if I was wearing a set of obvious headphones? Maybe a bright shiny set of AirPod Max headphones…“
At least I’m a sir. It’s at this point we exchange pseudo pleasantries and I move inside to continue working undisturbed. Jesse follows me in then lays down with a heavy sigh.
I guess my annoyance stems from the fact that I don’t like someone forcing me into a position where their sense of importance is predicated on my responding to them whether I give a shit about them or not.
Perhaps this is why I loathe the TQIA2S+ abc∏ part of the LGB community. I don’t care if they exist or not. I shouldn’t be forced to validate them.
I completed the course. I got the certificate and it is now listed on my resume and the linked in account for what that’s worth.
All of this leads to a question about the viability of remote work here at the house. I can’t be in a conference call with obscenities and fake whippoorwill bird calls punctuated with screaming.
Remote work will likely involve a lot of conference calls and video chat time. How can I explain it’s nothing, when those sounds will appear to be coming from inside my house?
Which leads me back to the whole issue of being subjugated in my own space by the vagaries of others who have no self control, common sense, or respect for their fellow humans.
That leads me back to being grumpy.
Hopefully, the neighbors lady friend and her defective offspring will be leaving soon. I rather suspect that the next door neighbor is finding this tiresome too.
He’s a voice actor who works from his home. He has a nice studio setup inside the house, but even his soundproofing probably can’t cut out all the noise from his back yard. If he starts missing deadlines due to retakes, he may decide the price is too high.
Am I a bad person for wanting peace and quiet? Has my neighborhood become like the apartment complex I lived in down in Escondido? I don’t have gunshots ringing out 2 blocks over on weekends when rival gangs went to war with each other… yet. But certainly things appear to be going south here in my little mountain community.
If I’m going to have to put up with incessant noise, what’s the point of living here? An apartment in Wyoming, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, or three blocks from my mother and stepfather in Florida would do just as well. A perk is that I could call the landlord when something broke.
I find myself wondering if I’m crazy, just grumpy, suffering from over sensitivity, or are these things that annoy the shit out of me actually valid.
It’s time for bed. I’m exhausted. Once agin, the dog is right.
Tomorrow, I’ll send out the new resume and wait to see if this improves my responses.
While I’m waiting for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend to come to a close, I’ll clean and toss more stuff.
Remember Memorial Day isn’t about sales, or garage sales. It’s about remembering and appreciating all those who didn’t come home and who believed that fighting for our ability to have a BBQ and shop in peace and freedom was worth their lives.
I guess compared to their sacrifice, my bitching is insignificant.
Hug a soldier and have a nice few days.
There’s a report in 
To be clear, I have an intense dislike for James Comey. It started when he was demanding Apple provide the FBI with backdoor access to iPhones to make it easy for the FBI to engage in illegal searches and surveillance of citizen’s phones.
The show is well done and Murderbot’s inner dialog is hysterical.