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Sigh. With the early advent of spring, the peace and quiet of the afternoon is destroyed by the continuous and obnoxious roaring of lawnmowers. You'd think that out here in the rural farmlands it wouldn't be necessary to waste gasoline, create pointless air pollution, and destroy the peace of a sunny day just for a silly status symbol like the clipped lawn, but there is just no winning that argument.
One of the things that drove me out of Chicago was excessive noise. Now that we've lived out here for nearly 14 years, I'm almost driven to distraction yet again and by what? Excessive noise. Motorcycles with essentially no mufflers, lawnmowers, trucks without mufflers, snowmobiles, airplanes, and even televisions and radios turned up so loud that I can hear them from a quarter mile away.
Work is no better. You'd think that working in a library would be at least reasonably quiet, but it isn't. The idea of a library as a quiet zone seems to have been completely forgotten. We have people standing under the "no cell phones please" sign shouting into their cell phones, school kids racing around the library, pre-school kids screaming and yelling as well as racing around the library, and adult library users who are so hard of hearing that everything they say is shouted as if they thought WE were the deaf ones. Soon it will be May when they open the nearby city pool, crank up the obnoxious music so it can be heard a mile away, and let in the screaming kids. Meanwhile comes the period of tornado sirens, loud motorcycles, and barking dogs.
I don't know which is the nastier prospect: having to put up with this garbage or going deaf with old age. The latter seems unlikely unless it happens from hearing damage due to loud noise levels.
One of the things that drove me out of Chicago was excessive noise. Now that we've lived out here for nearly 14 years, I'm almost driven to distraction yet again and by what? Excessive noise. Motorcycles with essentially no mufflers, lawnmowers, trucks without mufflers, snowmobiles, airplanes, and even televisions and radios turned up so loud that I can hear them from a quarter mile away.
Work is no better. You'd think that working in a library would be at least reasonably quiet, but it isn't. The idea of a library as a quiet zone seems to have been completely forgotten. We have people standing under the "no cell phones please" sign shouting into their cell phones, school kids racing around the library, pre-school kids screaming and yelling as well as racing around the library, and adult library users who are so hard of hearing that everything they say is shouted as if they thought WE were the deaf ones. Soon it will be May when they open the nearby city pool, crank up the obnoxious music so it can be heard a mile away, and let in the screaming kids. Meanwhile comes the period of tornado sirens, loud motorcycles, and barking dogs.
I don't know which is the nastier prospect: having to put up with this garbage or going deaf with old age. The latter seems unlikely unless it happens from hearing damage due to loud noise levels.
