For all the chirping I do about our horrible neighbours, I’m sure the people who live below us think the same about us. In fact, they probably think we’re the worst people in the universe. I’m sure if I scoured the internet, I’d find a site called Rumbling Cough or Look at my Scabies that has a running commentary of all the awful things we do. We like to THINK we’re so awesome and considerate of others; the sun glinting off our halos as birds serenade us with a chorus praising our glory, but no. Truth of the matter is we’re just as bad as we think everyone else is.

For starters, we tend to clean the apartment at strange times. Before we were chastised most severely, Ed enjoyed vacuuming at night; usually around 8pm. The downstairs people let us know that a) our vacuum was loud, b) they have a baby who sleeps at this time, and c) please shut the hell up and do your housecleaning during the day like normal people. We didn’t know it bothered them, so we apologized and cut back on our late night vacuuming.

Unfortunately, I also like to clean late at night. Last Saturday I got it in my head to reorganize my girl sauces in the bedroom. This is all fine and good, except it was midnight. While I was dragging baskets of girl sauces out to sort and fondle, I was apparently making some unholy noise. There was a knock on our door, and lo – it was the itchy coughing man standing in his underwear, asking us to stop dragging the damn corpses across the bedroom floor because we were right above their bedroom and it was quite possibly almost as annoying as his rumbling, non-stop coughing. I stopped, of course, but I wasn’t really making THAT much noise. The “dragging” was my pulling a box out from under the dresser, then putting it back. Still, it probably shouldn’t have been done at midnight so I stopped.

That’s two strikes against us that we know about, but how many more do we not know about? I can think of at least one right away: our horse.

Much like the idiots upstairs have an elephant, we have a horse in our apartment. The horse sleeps all day and only really makes noise at 11pm and again at 8am. Horses need exercise, and ours like to gallop around. It’s incredibly loud in our suite; I can only imagine what it sounds like downstairs. We’ve tried to stop the horse from pounding around the floors, but anything we do only makes him more excited and more prone to galloping and also poo arias. It’d be fine if he wasn’t so large, but how do you tell a 20lb horsecat to stop being a cat? He’s barely 1.5 years old; he’s just getting into the playful stage. I feel bad every time he starts to stomp all around the apartment, but it’s also really funny. They haven’t complained yet, and I find it hard to believe that my pushing a box 1 foot across the floor is more annoying than a horse galloping around like an idiot.

I’m also incredibly clumsy and drop things all the time. I’d want to hurt me if I lived below myself. Hopefully they’re a little less sensitive to noise than I am, or I’m in trouble in addition to being not as awesome as I claim.