Living in Orange County has generally been great. There's more to do, nice scenery, lots of restaurants and fair weather. That's why it's crowded. It's why it costs way too much to live here.

Anyway, I grew up in the country. For most of my childhood, my closest neighbors were generally hundreds of acres away. So I'm used to lots of privacy and best of all, lots of silence. But that's a luxury where I live now. Living in an apartment, I understand that people make noise. But the people above us sound like they're tossing sandbags around. Big sandbags. Um, human-sized ones. And they're so loud, we could even hear their voices last night, laughing and well, not yelling but I guess just trying to wake the dead. The worst part is that we haven't had this problem until two days ago. I think they must not have been there until then. But now we have all of our shelves put up, our cable installed - basically, we're moved in, and we're comfortable. Brandon's still comfortable. Noise is no thing for him. And it might stay that way, except that I keep waking him up to say, "There! Did you hear that? That was loud! (Boom!) See?" Then he'll groggily agree that it's bad and try to sleep again.

I tried turning on the fan to have noise to drown it out, and then added the bathroom fan, both of which did nothing. Come to think of it, I had a problem with loud neighbors when I lived in the girls' dorm in college as well. So anyway, I'm thinking maybe I should get one of those nerdy noisemakers. That way I can fall asleep to the sounds of the rainforest or the sound of the ocean. Or maybe just crickets. As long as it will lull me to sleep and allow me to stay asleep. I'm sure Brandon would like that as well.