Sleep

Do you know what it's like being woken up at 11pm by a child screaming its head off while running around what would be the master bedroom right above your own master bedroom? If you don't because you've been lucky enough to never have to live on the first floor in an apartment or condo complex, then I'll tell you. It sounds like a small horse galloping at full speed while screetching in pain. Over and over and over again.

Needless to say, this will wake most people up, including me, who is having a major issue lately with feeling rested while going through her day because she's either waking up to pee or waking up to round up noise-making kitties to lock them in the other room.

So we had three choices last night:

1. Call the cops and complain about a screaming child and we're not sure if its being tortured or not (I'm sure the parents would have loved that -- child protection services showing up to ask them a million questions).

2. Go upstairs, knock loudly on door, wait for whomever to answer, then yell at them.

3. Get the broom and proceed to whack the ceiling a bazillion times so that they'd get the point that we can hear their small horse galloping around at 11pm.

Since this is not the first time we've encountered this issue, we went with #3 because it tends to be the easiest and gets the point across well. Unfortunately there are some people who don't take kindly to the broom handle beating the ceiling, their floor, and revolt, which is what happened last night. Instead of quieting down immediately, they started stomping as loudly as they could for about 20-30 seconds, off and on.

I ran away to the living room since they seemed to be holed up in the bedroom above ours. I need to sleep. I must sleep. So if I have to sleep on the couch, I will sleep on the couch.

After a while they stopped, and my husband came out and got me. During this time, my guardian angel, aka Zoe, was sitting on the TV table that was near my head, staring at me. I told her to get back to bed, and she took off running like a bat out of hell (she gets real nervous-like when there are weird noises, and horses galloping above her would fall into that category).

So here I am today, deadly tired, ready to blow and not really talking to anyone, and if I do, it's more of a complaint or snippy comment than a friendly hello.

Beware.

Grr!