So, at about one-thirty in the morning, a couple of cars pulled up right outside my window. One of them made a loud noise, and they were putting on an obnoxious light show complete with blinding white strobes. They were camped out on the street for a solid hour, blocking the driveway (to the chagrin of one of our neighbors who keep strange hours) and generally keeping me awake.

I should’ve called the cops… OH WAIT.

(Two Portland Police cars, one white Mustang, and eventually a tow truck for the Mustang since its driver was eventually stuffed into the back of a police car. If the one cruiser had simply toned down the rock-concert lighting effects I might’ve been able to get back to sleep. Argh.)

So, if my daughter’s school choir performance hadn’t been scheduled for tonight…

And, if the #9 Broadway TriMet driver hadn’t gotten lost for a few minutes on the way home…

…I’d have missed some guy totalling his Volvo because he was in a hurry to race the yellow light. (more…)

I should clear something up.

It’s not that I should, or would, call the cops on the Party House most nights. See, in fact their music isn’t actually that loud. (Most nights.)

The problem is that it’s just loud enough.

Most people can and do sleep through the low-level bass rhythm they can barely make out above the ambient noises in their sleeping area. Most people have an ability to tune out (as it were) anything that isn’t a foreground annoyance. You’ll note that I’m not most people, however.

Let’s add it up: I’m a nervous, easily-startled person. I can’t not-listen to any kind of music, just due to funny mental hardwiring. I almost always have a difficult time getting to sleep. So, there I am, 11:30pm and unable to even get partway to slumberland because there’s a quiet but steady “bum-bum dum, bum-bum dum” coming from the apartment across the carpark.

I’m sure they think I’m some sort of annoying lunatic. I probably am, come to think on it. But I had to ask them to turn the bass down just a bit, nonetheless. Of course, by the time I get annoyed enough to get dressed again and stomp over there to have words with them… my adrenaline’s so high that I’m not sleeping for a while yet anyway, am I?

Cannot win. Just, cannot.

I’m the proud parent of a college student.

Well, that’s a strange thing to find myself saying, now isn’t it? Not the “proud parent” part; I’ve been that for a number of years now, since I have two awesome offspring. It’s the “college student” part I’m still wrapping my brain around. Not that we haven’t known it was coming. Alex applied and was accepted to DigiPen a while ago, with financial aid sorted out a few weeks ago along with the living situation.

On Sunday, however, he actually left Portland. The Seattle area is his home now and will be for at least the next four years, potentially much longer. (That’s where a lot of the jobs are, after all.)

Funny thing is, I was fine up until Saturday afternoon when the kids got on the #9 bus for home at the end of what was the Spud’s final weekly parental visitation time. We hugged, and they got on the bus, and I damned near lost it. Fine time to get emotional, eh?

Mind you, he turns 18 about ten days from now. That’s not the part which makes me feel odd. (No, not “feel old,” because my failing joints take care of that very nicely, thankyouverymuch.) It’s that he’s off to school in another state and just plain doesn’t need his folks anymore. (Miss, possibly. Care about, certainly. But need? Not hardly, except for making sure his pesky finances are covered. Heh.)

I guess that means we did our job right… right?

Now all I have to do is help get the younger child up on her own two feet and my work is complete… insofar as parenting is ever really done, of course.

I’ve been on a tight budget lately. Costs keep going up, but my income stays… rather flat. So I end up buying cheap breakfast and lunch fixings. Unfortunately I get tired of sandwiches very, very quickly. I can, however, do a couple of days of sausage-dogs before I have to cycle over to some other cheap and generally-unhealthy food item like cardboard burritos and cheap french-bread pizzas out of the frozen-goods aisle at the supermarket.

So, take it from me:

Unlike their cousins, the “Beddar [sic] with Cheddar” smoked sausages, Johnsonville’s “BOLD [wtf] Chili Cheese” smoked sausages are to be avoided at all costs.

Eww. I have another day’s worth of them to get through and I’m not sure that starvation isn’t a better option.