Noise Pollution

We live in a very quiet pleasant urban neighborhood... most of the time. Sure, sometimes it gets a little noisy from the traffic going past our house during commuter rush hour as the folks in the suburbs use our neighborhood as a cut through on their way downtown. The recent installation of the speed humps on our street and throughout the neighborhood have toned down that problem somewhat.

The past few days have been very noisy around here for a different reasons. People have been working on their home, hired contractors and have had a lot of tree trimming being done. That's all a very good thing but it sure gets noisy.

One guy spent two afternoons power washing his house using a very loud portable power washer. He did the driveway too. Another home had a very large tree in the backyard taken down and put into a chipper on the street. Extremely loud and an all day job. Another neighbor had a very large branch come down in some wind and had that cut up and taken away. A couple of days later they had the entire tree cut down and chipped. Our next door neighbor had the recently taken down tree's stump ground down to nothing. It only took a couple of hours but it sure was loud.

On the street behind our house there was a lot of work done on some roofs which was also very loud. Hammering and shouting too. Right behind our home the neighbor was working on his backyard pavilion with a lot of power tools. He played a lot of loud new agey music too LOL.

And then there are the airplanes. Once again the airport has shifted the runways because of renovations and the flight paths are again coming directly over our homes. I hear them early in the morning and then throughout the day. It's really annoying. I wrote about them a couple of times last year... airport runway and flight paths and the plane again. Hopefully that project will be completely over this Fall.

I'll end this little rant with a little comment about dogs. There are a lot of dogs on the block and most are fine. However, there is a little yappy dog down the street that spends a good part of the afternoon in their backyard with a very loud high pitched yappy bark that goes on and on. It's almost a block away and very distant sounding but still annoying. I can hear it when I'm sitting in the kitchen at my laptop and it is bothersome when I'm in the backyard reading. I can't imagine what the close by neighbors feel about that constantly barking dog.

Oh, and let's not forget the chickens. Most of the time they are quiet but sometimes something riles them up and they are noisy. Well, I'm ok with their noise.