It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

I have neighbors. Living in an apartment complex, that's to be expected. They are surprisingly quiet neighbors. I hear the most minimal of TV/stereo noise coming from them, which is quite the nice change from the ones that I had a couple years ago. It was a man & his twenty-one year old son. The man worked until about two in the morning. His son, on the other hand, had parties every night, consisting of loud noise, cigarettes & people yelling & swearing at each other. That was finally taken care of with a few phone calls from around the complex.

The two sets of neighbors that I share walls with now are fairly courteous &, as mentioned before, quiet. My only complaint with the next door neighbor is that he smokes. And, of course, this isn't done in his apartment, oh no. Wouldn't want to go stinking up his place. Instead, he would rather sit on his patio & let the smoke waft into our unit. I think my going to the back door & saying, rather loud, "Great! Gorgo the Smogmonster is smoking on the porch again!" before I slam the door shut has started getting the point across. I haven't noticed the smell as much.

My downstairs neighbors, they being the ones with the affinity for curry, are quiet as well. I don't see the parents around much, so I kinda suspect that they got the apartment for their two sons & stay from time to time to keep up appearances. The kids are quiet, though, & I've only had to ask them once to turn down the music. The thing that drives me nuts with them (besides the stench of curry always coming up through the floor) has to do with the plumbing in our apartments. You see, when they turn on their bath, it sounds like freakin' Niagra Falls in our bedroom. The good news is that they turn on the shower almost immediately, which is much quieter (unlike the previous neighbors, who would leave the water running to warm up for a few minutes before the got into the shower). The bad new is -

These people take approximately fifty-seven showers a day.

I'm not kidding.

They shower in the morning. They shower in the early afternoon. They shower in the midafternoon. They shower in the early evening & then again later in the evening. Then, just to make sure they didn't miss anything, I guess, they shower again at night. And then again just after midnight. And let's not forget all of the midmorning, mid-midmorning, preafternoon, pre-midafternoon, post-pre-midafternoon, five minutes 'til evening, preevening, post-preevening, pre-post-preevening, prenight, post-prenight, it's-10 o'clock-&-I-haven't-taken-a-shower-in-the-past-five-minutes, premidnight, post-pre-post-pre-two-minutes-to-midnight & the ah-what-the-heck-let's-take-one-more showers taken inbetween. When the whole family's home, there's four of them doing this bathing routine.

I don't know if they figure that since the water is paid for by the complex they'll stock up on showers or what. Maybe they're amphibious aliens who absorb water through their skin. I dunno. But they have got to be the cleanest people I've ever met. They freakin' squeak when they walk by.

And despite all of the scrub-a-dub-dubbing, they still smell like curry.