I must finally be getting old.
There was once a time in my life when I could fall asleep at the drop of a hat and you'd have more luck raising the dead than rousing me. When I was a teenager, my uncle used to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings by using a variety of clever tactics. Once, he set my clock radio really loud, then hid it somewhere else in the room. Frustrating. Another time, he actually threw water on me in an attempt to get me to leave the comfort and security of slumberland. Annoying. On a particularly vicious occasion, he set off the fire alarm outside my room! If the incredibly loud sound wouldn't have coaxed me out of bed, I'm sure the fact that I wet myself would have!
Last night, despite how terribly exhausted I was from the new hours at work, I just couldn't make myself fall asleep at a decent hour. I tried watching some boring TV (we certainly have enough of that in Canada!), reading a book that I'd read already, and, finally, willing myself into unconsciousness.
Nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing, exactly. You ever lie in bed for so long, trying to fall asleep and thinking about a million different random things, then suddenly you are wide awake asking yourself, "Was I just asleep?" Well, that happened quite few times last night. If I had to guess, I'd say I probably finally drifted off around 11:15, a good hour and a half after I went to bed.
And then the fun began.
At 11:45, I sat bolt upright in bed, something I never do. Something had woken me up. Was it the phone? No. How about the 5-year old sleeping in the next room. Again, no. What the..? And then I woke up enough to realize what was going on...
Music.
You see, I recently moved into a new house with my daughter. To be specific, we moved into the basement suite of said house and, lucky us, there are 3 20-something guys living above. Now, I haven't been here long enough to have met these guys yet, but that's okay. So far, they've kept to themselves and I've done likewise. There hasn't been any reason to think that this living arrangement wouldn't work out... Until I heard the music.
I couldn't exactly make out the words to the song, but the drumbeats were coming through loud and clear, making an interesting counter-rhythm to the steadily increasing pulse in my ears as I became more and more angry. It was almost midnight on a Tuesday, for crying out loud!
Unacceptable.
I got up and went to check on my daughter. Apparently, she takes after dear old Dad, since she was as motionless as ever with her pink, plush dog clutched under her arm. Good. One less thing to worry about... For now.
The music wasn't quite as noticeable in the living room, so I toyed with the idea of simply crashing on the couch and dealing with the problem the next day.
Yeah, right.
As soon as I laid my head down and got myself settled as well as one can on a sofa, the song changed and I could hear it as loud as ever. Now I was sure my daughter would wake up any second. So, despite my less than presentable appearance and the late hour, I pulled on a pair of jeans and went to meet the neighbors. I felt like Mr. Roper storming upstairs to yell at those "crazy kids" from Three's Company. I can't really be old enough to remember that, can I?
I can only imagine what was going through that guy's mind when he peered through the blinds on his back door and saw this stranger with a headful of bedhair glaring back at him. I have to admit, I'm impressed that he had the guts to open the door at all... I'm not sure I would! Anyway, it turned out that "Dillon" is a pretty decent kid and he was more than apologetic and willing to turn down the tunes. Turns out, we're so quiet downstairs that he thought no one was home!
So, with that potential disaster averted, I made my way back down to my suite, exchanged the jeans for the pajama bottoms, and crawled back into bed. As you can probably imagine, after all that excitement, it took quite a while for me to settle back down to the point where I could fall asleep...
I think the clock said 1:45 the last time I looked.
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