Noise Annoys Me

One of the banes of my existence is noise. My sleeping habits are such that, pretty much any noise will wake me up, as well as prevent me from falling asleep in the first place. Having lived in apartments for most of my first twenty-seven years, I was always having to deal with - live with - noisy neighbours who'd play music at all hours of the night, bang around like elephants on parade on the floor above me, or slam doors every time they came or went. Once I graduated to living in houses - thanks to Vicki! - some of this went away. As a home-owner, you can control a lot more of what goes on around you, but of course not all of it.

Case in point: for the last few years, one of the houses that our backyard backs onto has been infested - I mean, inhabited - by a young family of four who, I've come to believe, are socially-retarded. Their mental faculties aren't really impaired; just their social graces. Vicki quickly labelled them as "trailer trash" when they first moved in, and I scoffed. But before too long, I had to concede her the point. The two parents are the types who yell back and forth across their very small yard - which is mostly just the pool - rather than getting off their fat asses so as to be able to speak to each other at a conversational level. Or possibly they're just hard of hearing and don't realize it. Either way, we get to hear exchanges like:

"BILL, DID YOU CLOSE THAT DOOR?"

"WHAT?!"

"DID YOU CLOSE THAT DOOR?"

"WHAT?!"

"THE DOOR.. DID YOU CLOSE IT WHEN YOU CAME OUT?"

"WHEN I WHAT?"

"WHEN YOU CAME OUTSIDE.. DID YOU CLOSE THAT DOOR?"

"YEAH, I DID!"

"OH, GOOD!"

And it's like that... all the time! I don't think there's ever been a time when more than one of them has been in their backyard, when we've been in ours, that we haven't heard pretty much everything they've said to one another. And we're usually up on our deck, at least thirty or forty feet from their yard, with a hedge in between! Their yard is completely exposed, with five or six houses within earshot of them, and yet they act like they're out in the country somewhere, with no one to bother for miles around. I can usually hear them better than I can pick up on what Vicki's saying to me, sitting across the table from me.

Anyway, what I've been thinking about lately is how Vicki solved part of my overnight noise problem. She bought me a small device that we call a NoiseMaker, which you plug in and turn on in order to produce audio loops of various sounds. There's White Noise (the only one I use anymore), Waterfall, Heartbeat, Storm, Light Rain, and so on, along with a volume control so you can adjust it to the proper level for you. This thing's a lifesaver when I stay in hotels, because often they're so noisy late at night that I'd never get any sleep.

So now I'm wondering if they sell bigger versions of that idea, for use outdoors? I don't want to drown the knobs behind us with music, because I'm afraid that'd give them the idea of bringing a boom-box into their own backyard so they can play Rap, Conway Twitty, or something comparable. But I'd love to have some sort of a White Noise Generator that I could install in the back part of our yard that's next to theirs, to see if it could make things better at all. I actually left the lawn mower running, one day last summer, just to enjoy ten minutes outside without having to hear them yammering at each other at the top of their lungs.

So does anyone know of any such product on the market? I've tried looking for something like that on the Internet, but always end up on sites that simply recommend putting privacy hedges up (which we did... two years ago!). Every summer, since they moved in, I've contemplated moving, despite the fact that I know we could end up with the same problem anywhere.