Ah, the weekend. Last thursday night the new neighbors causally stated that they were having some friends over Friday night, but it wouldn't be loud.
"Having some friends over". Well, in my book, that means a relatively managable sized group of friends comes by, usually during some sort of shortish time-frame, arrive. Hang out. Talk. Listen to music. Maybe barbeque.... and at some point in the evening, they all go home, or some of them go home and some stay overnight, whatever.
What this was... was different. At about 10:30 there were a dozen cars belonging to people who do not live on our small street parked up and down the street. The rave music was thumping next door. They'd given me their number so that I could call if it was too loud. It was. I did. The first number, I got their answering machine. Guess they couldn't hear that one. The second was a cell phone which was answered. They turned it down and we went to bed. We couldn't hear the party in our bedroom.
However, what we could here was the outside effects of a revolving-door party that goes on way into the night. A nearly 5-hour steady stream of people coming and going. Car doors slamming, people talking as if they were in some night-club parking lot instead of a quiet neighborhood. Cars cruising up and down the street looking for places to park. I got no sleep. About 2:30am when the umpteenth car had its doors slammed and the couple who came out of it were hollering at each other across the street, I got up and went out and yelled out "HEY! This ain't a night club parking lot, it's a neighborhood! Keep it DOWN!"
"OK...."
People started leaving shortly after that. Probably afraid I'd call the cops. But I was peeved and didn't get any sleep until about 6:00 am, and we needed to get up at 7:00 because we had plans that day with the neighbors across the street.
I think any decent neighbor will turn his head and acommodate the occasional big party. But this was the second one in three weeks, and certainly not what was "advertised" to us ("having some friends over"). And I think... if you'll dig the pun, that it's "par-ty for the course" as far as they're concerned. So it looks like it's time to talk to them again. Sigh. Why can't people just be considerate?
Anyway, went to Ha Ha Tonka state park (http://www.mostateparks.com/hahatonka.htm) Saturday. Very pretty. Had a picnic lunch that the Williams' brought along. Hiked through the park. Took lots of pictures. Saw springs, lots of karst topography. Apparently that whole valley was once a huge cave. There's a spring there, and a "balanced rock" on a small island. And up on a ridge is the ruins of an old stone mansion... it was like a 17 room mansion. It was something in its day. It was built in the early 1900's and burned down in the 30's. Guess they should've used a slate roof ;-)
Sunday I FINALLY got around to replacing the windows in the front. It was a lot harder to get the old glass out than I thought it would be. And it took a lot more glazing. I was going to silicon the new glass in, but after trying to get the old glass out I went for glazing.
There were a couple of small cracks in a corner which I sanded and sealed with epoxy. Ryan came over and helped get the glass out and put the glazing on. I had to go back to Lowe's and get more glazing... took a lot more than I thought it would. It also didn't harden fast... it still wasn't hard this morning.
But we put the windows back up about 8:30 last night and it seems like it's all going to hold.
Well.... that's about it. We finally got some rain last weekend (that's two weekends ago) but it's been dry ever since. Oh, and apparently the sump pump in the crawl space blew the hose off and has been sitting there churning water ever since. I noticed that last night about 2:00 in the morning and fixed it.
Ok, that's really about it. I'm going now.
