Well, it's 1:10am, and I'm being kept awake again. It's starting to become something of a habit. I've been lying in bed for the last hour and a bit, listening to the sound of the earth-movers in the street outside moving large bits of the road around.

It's funny, really, because I thought that the big problem of living here would be the fact that I'm a few hundred metres from six parallel train tracks. When I walk out of my front door, I can hear the little announcer-voice saying "This train is now due to depart. Please stand clear." When I came in to look at the place, I asked the tenant (not the landlord or agent) whether the train noise was a problem, and she said "No, you don't notice it. The only noise comes from the building site, but they'll be done in a few months." Oh, prophetic words. I've not had one problem sleeping through the occasional train noise that filters through my walls, but this is the third night in the last week that I've been kept up by people digging up roads.

Also, my neighbours play guitar and sing very late at night on weekends. I wouldn't mind too much - loud neighbours are a blessing if you're a loud neighbour yourself - but I did go around and ask them to be quiet when they hadn't turned the stereo down by 2am. I refuse to do the banging-on-walls thing, though, I have my dignity. The other problem was their attempt at a rendition of Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye". Grace should come with a warning label: "You will not be able to sing along with this. No, not even if you're drunk."

The problem with the street outside is that it's narrow, two very thin lanes with barely enough room for trucks to pass each other in opposite directions, but because it's a bridge over the train track, and it links two pretty arterial roads, if they were to dig it up during the day it'd probably back traffic up all the way back to the city. I know that's what I'll be told if I complain about the noise, anyway.

I'm teaching an OB77 next week. Joy. Teaching is one of the things I don't like about my current job, but I like enough of the other stuff that it's only a minor annoyance. Nobody on the staff really likes the teaching, I think, but it's a sacrifice we have to make in order to stay as cool as we obviously are. I get to play with some pretty big RS/6000 boxes on the next job. Of course, they'll be running AIX, but nothing's perfect.

Fish are groovy.