Motel Neighbors
Last night my plan was to get to bed early so I could wake up around 6am or so. Which would have gone great if it wasn’t for the neighbors. Earlier in the day yesterday, I’d opened up the cable TV jack in the wall and dug through about 7 inches of insulation to expose the back of THEIR cable TV jack. So all that was separating us was a thin piece of plastic. My plan was to set my digital recorder in the wall and get some good recordings of their fights. Jammie says I’m doing this out of boredom, but I say it’s out of fascination with these people. I think it’s amazing that they just go on and on and on with their arguing for hours at a time. So this is like a National Geographic thing for me – I’m trying to study and record them from a distance. It’s not creepy at all, I swear.
Anyway, the digital recorder didn’t pick up anything. So I went to Target and bought a PC microphone for $9.99. It’s one of the long ones, so it was able to reach all the way to the back of their plastic thing, pressed right up against it. But still, I just couldn’t hear anything. So I gave up on that, put the TV jack back together and went for a more low-tech approach – I put the microphone under the door. And it worked! The quality isn’t that great, but it works. They got home soon after I got back from Target and they ranted at each other for a full hour, which I recorded directly onto my PC. I’ll have to go through it later and pull out the good parts.
So yesterday evening, after an early dinner of Nutter Butters, I decided that I would go to bed very early. I spent the rest of the evening reading and talking to Jammie. By 9:30 or so, I was trying to sleep but the people next door were going nuts on each other. He was hitting her, she was biting him, they were both yelling a lot. If I weren’t so determined to get to sleep early, I could have had some classic stuff recorded. It just went on and on for hours. But I put an extra pillow over my head to muffle the sound and eventually went to sleep. I awoke at 5:30am and they were STILL YELLING. I’m not sure if it went on all night, but they were still pretty pissed. I finally got up for the day an hour later and they were completely silent.
This morning, my water was orange. Last night, Jammie made fun of me for a large portion of our conversation because I said, “I think there’s something wrong with the motel’s water.”
“Why?”
“Because when I turn on the faucet, there’s no water.”
I got lots of “OH, YOU THINK?” and references to Sherlock Holmes. When the water finally came back on, I told her it probably wasn’t safe to drink and I’d need to boil it or something. And she made fun of me more for that. Well, if I wasn’t so tired this morning, I would have thought to take a picture of the ORANGE WATER POURING OUT OF MY SHOWER to show her. I had the same thing in my sink. After running it for a few minutes, it finally turned clear again. Nice of the motel to warn us…
This morning I went to breakfast at the Original Breakfast restaurant. On my way out, I slammed the door as hard as possible, hoping to possibly jolt the neighbors awake. When I got back I did the same thing and I could hear the guy muttering about something. I went out for a Pepsi, slammed the door, came back inside, slammed the door, more muttering. I’m not pissed or anything, I just want them to wake up and start yelling at each other some more.