Another Sleepless Night

Last week was Frankie's first taste of conjunctivitis, the week before that he had the Hershey Squirts for three or four days. Yesterday, he slept like a baby and it looked like we were in for more of the same tonight when he turned in at half past ten. Unfortunately, though, he woke up at two and it's half past five now and he's nowhere near going back to sleep. He is at once inconsolable and playful, trying out his vocal cords wailing one minute and singing the next. He doesn't want Daddy today so I've been folding the laundry. Babysitter doesn't open until nine, and I start my Saturday shift at the "English Consulting Company" at one. Seven hours of jr high school mumblers does not look appealing today.

Gives me a moment, anyhow to relate a story from last weekend. The neighbors kept us up with their house music. I'm officially old and grumpy as I called the cops. This wasn't the first time. The next morning, I was downstairs talking to the security guard about the problem we have in the early morning hours and he apologized and said he'd speak to the landlord. It is his habit to answer a complaint with a complaint in return, often one a couple of weeks old and he produced my downstairs neighbor out of thin air to tell me that my dog was making too much noise with his food dish--clanging it on the tile floor and whatnot. I answered him directly that our dog is now three years old and is extremely well behaved and that as soon as he finishes eating his dinner, we wash his bowl in the sink and put it away and that we have done things this way for a number of months. Further to that, I suggested that the sound he was hearing was our 15 month old son dropping his crib toys over the side onto our floor/his ceiling. I apologized profusely and told him that we would be sure to follow up on this situation in the future and if he has any further issues with noise that we will whisk the boy off to the mountain top where he will stay until he reaches adult hood.

Before I started the previous paragraph, someone set off a large string of firecrackers downstairs outside our building. That was 0530 on a Saturday morning. It was over before you could do something that would take you two minutes to do. Not so bad, it's the sort of thing that one gets used to in Taiwan. The neighbor downstairs with the sensitive ears, not too long ago woke us up on a Sunday morning with the sound of an electric drill as he sank about six anchors for his family shrine into the wall. He had consulted a fortune teller and that was the most auspicious time.

I am still waiting to hear whether or not my neighbor likes AC/DC.

It's now Saturday night (0118 Sunday morning) and our little angel went to bed at 2230 so mom & dad were able to watch a DVD and drink a bottle of wine.