I live in very quiet neighborhood VERY close to Richy McMansionville. It's weird. I mean, I like it, but I don't know my neighbors and it's just different than what I'm used to.

I haaaaate the noise outside my apartment -- there's a really loud piece of HVAC machinery that makes a ton of white noise that makes me crazy. I would much rather hear traffic and street noises out the window, given a neighborhood of mostly people with mostly dayjobs.

Very busy weekend. We got the utilities on so we could have an inspection of the new house, and it turned up a lot of things that the HUD inspection said were fine. So we decided to back out of the deal, it was getting too expensive to make it work.

Then our A/C broke down and we could neither get anyone out to fix it or get a condenser fan. My FIL and I managed to get it working by lubricating the motor with 3-in-1 oil, hopefully it'll get fixed up for real today.

We also started putting up a new section of fence inside our yard. When done we'll dismantle the old section and use the additional space to build a berm to keep water from running through the yard and garden during heavy storms.

I did manage to sneak in some time on COG and the Clockwork Dragons while I wait on my agent's comments on COG.

I also met Matt who came up to get my old iMac, which was cool. It's unfortunate it was on such a busy day. He also got to meet Gunnar, but Gunnar wasn't on his best behavior.

I live in very quiet neighborhood VERY close to Richy McMansionville.

Anywhere in Johnson county seems like it's close to one Richy McMansionville or another. What do all those people do?

Anywhere in Johnson county seems like it's close to one Richy McMansionville or another. What do all those people do?

I dunno, but they care a LOT about lawn care!

Aw, sucks about the house plan, Gud. Hope another thing comes along that's even better.

Jesse, maybe the calendar already knows you're just Done.

My place is generally pretty quiet, considering I live right in the city. There's occasional plane noise (hard to avoid), and godawful early this morning there were SERIOUSLY crazy birds. I do not know WHAT was going on, but it wasn't chirping so much as honking, pretending to be a car alarm, and other fun stuff, for like, ten full minutes. And then they suddenly stopped.

...more annoying are the occasional fun bits of the apartment building next door. Either late night dramatics with people leaving or arriving and yelling at each other, or just folks sitting on their balconies talking loudly (the other week, there was this group of older dudes sitting on the balcony, talking loudly ALL DAY LONG. Literally, we noticed them first thing in the morning, and they talked INTO THE NIGHT. Which...OK, glad you're having fun but could ya be a little quieter???)

But those are more occasional than constant.

There are extraordinarily insistent birds outside of our new house. Or just one bird who makes a lot of noise several times a day.

Our hippie-girl neighbors (the ones who would spin fire and hoop in the street) moved out in May, after graduation. So it has gotten much quieter (although the new neighbors who moved in -- a young-ish couple -- have a small yappy dog, so not totally quiet).

Our neighborhood is in no way as quiet as the suburbs, but I am so used to it that when I go out to my mom's, the quietness is slightly freaky.

We hear street noise, but not much out of the ordinary. (Other than our favorite game t SPOILER: NOT REALLY A FAVORITE. OR A GAME. of "fireworks or gunfire?". That gets a little trickier this time of year, unless it's semi-automatic. [Which, to my knowledge, has happened only once since I moved in 5 1/2 years ago. There's somewhat frequent -- defined as "once every couple of months" -- isolated gunfire from non-automatic guns, but no semi-automatic shit, except that one time.])

We do have a neighbor across the street who has a drum kit that he does actually practice almost every day. He keeps his windows open, and even with ours closed and the a/c on, we can hear it. But it's no big deal (although sometimes it makes me want to run out on the porch and start playing air guitar).

Does feeling like you should get fired ever help anything?

I woke up this morning too headachey to function, and just feel like unreliable shit. Aargh. This does not help the headache go away.

Wimbledon real-time spoilers:

Holy crap, Nadal. Holy crap. This is really not your tournament any more.