move to the beach

Wanted : Peace And Quiet.

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Julie Pippert asks today – So tell me, what’s your ‘more’ that you wish was ‘less?’ What do you need, what would take that 50lb weight off your chest and shoulders?

I’m here all day, every day, unless The Other Half has a day off. His day offs are never the same day, one week out of four he has Saturday and Sunday but the rest of the time it is Monday/Tuesday, Tuesday/Wednesday, Wednesday/Thursday and then sometimes he just has the one day. If you want to go anywhere around here, especially in school holidays, weekends are times of busy traffic, of crowds, of screaming kids. That’s not something we enjoy.

The Other Half had Saturday and Sunday off, and on Saturday we went shopping in a place which is more populated than where we live. It was scary for me. Too many people. Too much movement. People walking where they want and not paying attention to others around them – bumping, pushing, like dodgem cars. We got in and out of there as fast as we could.

Personally, and no offense to those with kids who work a normal 9-5 week and have weekends off, we prefer the weekdays as days off. When we first moved here, I was working every single Saturday and it suited me just fine. I put a proposal to my parents which would have seen us never having a weekend off. Sales are better on the weekends most of the time, so that is when you want to be in the store. It never happened.

Being here alone much of the time would not be an issue at all if there was peace and quiet. I’ve mentioned before here on the blog that recently this has become a very noisy neighbourhood but the last week was the worst yet. There was not one day where the dog didn’t bark for at least 4 hours of it. As I sit here right now, that droning engine noise can just be heard over my music (coldplay) but I can also feel it through my feet – it is vibrating the very foundations of this house and consequently, going right into my soul. The dog was barking right outside my window about 10 minutes ago, prompting me to skype Sephy with the following –

Snoskred says: cam do ,e a l;ittle favour?
Sephy says: find you some new fingers? ;)
Sephy says: what’s up?
Snoskred says: find out if theres anything i can do about a barking dog
Snoskred says: it wont shut up!@
Snoskred says: and its right outside my window now

Yes, as you can see, when I’m annoyed, disturbed, not at peace, my typing goes out the window.

When the droning engine noise stops, it will be time for kids to get home from school and the people across the road will be outside playing rugby. When you kick a rugby ball, it makes a heck of a racket. It’s enough to make you shudder. Yet that’s not all. They will be shouting, screaming, yelling at each other.

This constant noise is difficult for me to tolerate. By Fridays I am ready to SNAP. Saturdays and Sundays may be a little quieter but there’s still the dog, there’s still the people across the road. My noise thermometer has gone down slightly over the weekend but each week it climbs higher and higher. How much more can I take? I honestly don’t know.

I need to move. I want out of this noisy place. I want to go to the place I believe will be more peaceful. There are 17 properties available where I want to move to right now. 5 of those are townhouses and very close to each other. Having lived in townhouses before and knowing how noisy they can be if neighbours are inconsiderate, I’m holding out for something better. I can see this new lifestyle inside my head, beach walks, a summer of bbq’s, of The Other Half coming home and we go out to walk for an hour.

The real estate agents down there are fairly useless. I’ve left them info about what we want, and have not heard from any of them, once. It baffles me! If a tenant came in and gave notice that they’re moving out, and you had tenants who wanted exactly what they were moving out from, wouldn’t you say – this might be the easiest solution, let me call these people and ask them to come and see it. Then I don’t have to list it, I don’t have to deal with trying to find people to live there. But no. Properties have been listed that we would have considered, and they have not called.

What would break me completely would be to get there and find out it’s just as noisy as this place is. But I need to get there in order to find out. That’s what I need. A new home.

beach1_600x400

move to the beach, noise

Heartbreak leads me to Stumble..

9 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve been a busy bee the last 24 hours or so. I’ve been using my StumbleUpon toolbar to “stumble” all the blogs listed under “Blogs I read daily via Google Reader” and “Australian Blogs Community” in my sidebar. So if you’re in there, you’ve been stumbled my friends. ;)

The reason I have been keeping myself busy is.. I had a major disappointment yesterday.

You may recall back in May, I wrote about my heart being broken when a house in the place I want to live turned out to be too small. I don’t usually like to make the same mistake twice, but yesterday I did it without even realizing it. Last Tuesday when we went looking at houses we’d seen this one that looked like it might work for us. It was very close to the beach in a quite peaceful area. I called the real estate lady and asked if we could arrange to look at it, and we made it for Monday next week.

I was pretty excited because it looked big enough to fit all our stuff in, and it was solid brick – many of the homes where we want to live are weatherboard or generally beach shacks you couldn’t live in during a winter. Sephy fired up Google Earth for me and he sent me a photo which had me daydreaming of beach walks every day taking my camera with me.

house1

The house is somewhere in this pic. ;)

By the time the other half got home from work, I’d already mentally packed all our stuff and moved in to the place. He had received a phone call from the real estate lady saying she had been in contact with the owners and they’d had a bad experience with cats and they wouldn’t accept us as tenants, so there was no point even looking at the house.

I was completely shocked. The next thing I know my eyes started to water all on their own and I was bawling. It sounds stupid to you guys I guess, but there is such a strong urge in me to go and live near that bay. After the tears, I started to get angry. Our cats have never done any kind of damage to a house. They have cat towers, they are desexed, they don’t pee on the carpet, they are well looked after. The worst they might have done is fur up a curtain, but that comes out in the wash.

Even worse – the current tenants clearly had young kids. So if I’d had kids instead of cats, it would be fine. I don’t have human babies, I have feline ones, so I can’t live there. It seems to me this is discrimination, and completely unfair. If they said to a couple with kids, sorry you have kids, you can’t live here, imagine the outcry!

Funnily enough it happened almost exactly two months after the last time.

“There’s nothing like work for getting over a disappointment” from Memoirs of a Geisha. I have to say, it really works. :) I’m feeling a lot better already. And it benefits all you guys in my sidebar as well because you might see some traffic from Stumbleupon now.. I hope you do. ;)

house hunt, mistakes I made, move to the beach

Metallica is scary..

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

So, Saturday the people across the road and their kids spent two hours out on their front lawn playing sport of some kind, and along with it went two solid hours of constant yelling, screaming, shouting, crying, and various other annoying noises. I’m not joking when I say solid, they did not shut up once, and it was so loud I think the kids must have hurt their throats.

Apparently not, because on Sunday they were back for two hours more. And I was actually trying to sleep at the time, because I’d woken up with a headache from hell and spent the rest of the day trying to get rid of it by sleeping it off.

You can bet two hours of them yelling and screaming did not go down well with me. They’re lucky I didn’t go out there in my sleeping attire and do some yelling and screaming of my own.

Monday, the school bus got home, and within one minute the kids started yelling and screaming. Within ten minutes the whole family plus some extra random kids from around the neighborhood were out there. I still had a dull version of the headache from the day before, and tried to drown them out with a movie. One hour and forty minutes later, I snapped.

I stormed into the kitchen and grabbed the Metallica DVD that we have. I took it into the big lounge with the big stereo system (that I never turn up over 25) and loaded it in there. Enter Sandman. I turned the volume up to 10 and went into the kitchen to get some headache tablets.

When I got back just three minutes later, the subwoofer had danced across the floor all by itself, there’s some vicious drumming in that song, and when I looked out the window, there was nobody to be seen. Probably they all ran inside to read their bibles and hide from the satanic music. I think all the other neighbors were actually thrilled and possibly inspired as to how to get rid of them next time.

Later that evening we were summoned to my parents house, probably 800-1000 metres away. I told my Mum what I’d done, and she said “That was you?” damn, it must have been loud. ;)

And today, thankfully, no screaming people. If they come back, it’ll be Metallica in 10 minutes next time. It’s just so inconsiderate to make so much annoying noise. I rarely make any noise here, the stereo is always at a reasonable level and I go outside to make sure it isn’t too loud that it would annoy anyone.

They only got 5 minutes of how much noise I’m happy to produce on a regular basis if they want to keep it up. Plus if they really upset me, my parents have the subwoofer of champions just down the street which I could borrow. ;)

I really love Metallica, by the way, everything up to St Anger, and I think many of their songs are true classics. It’s even better when you watch the film clips. But the choices are not limited to that. I think a bit of Marilyn Manson might really freak them out. It makes one wonder, what music would I need to play in order to inspire them to move out completely?

Angry Snoskred, move to the beach, music, noise