in need of some earplugs...

[ratcreature]

Why, oh why is there an extremely untalented guy with a guitar "singing" out in the street somewhere near my building at one in the morning?! He can't play the guitar either, judging by the same not-even-quite-a-chord sound he produces to accompany this wailing. Argh.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Well, he eventually shut up. I had a window open for a short while to air before going to bed, which made it especially bad, but I heard him before and after. And my windows are the usual double paned windows you have these days for standard sound/heat insulation, and my outside walls are mostly the roof, which is insulated with a layer of mineral wool for energy conservation, and a bit of brick wall of the kind you can expect in a 1909 building intended for working class use. (However the walls to the surrounding attic storage spaces otoh are, with the exception of the chimney walls, some kind of very flimsy thing made from materials they could find when they first converted this attic space into an extra living space during the housing shortages after WWII; I think it's some kind of cheap plaster over a lattices, or something, and from what I've seen from other walls of this kind maybe also newspaper of something like that, anyway, obviously those were never overhauled for the energy saving requirements like the outside walls were.)

It has been colder the last few days here, with some actual snow, but not much below 0°C and last night it was thawing again already. I live in a temperate maritime climate after all, with mild winters and cool summers, where the average temperature difference between January and July is something like 20°C, though we unfortunately had a bunch of hot summers the last years (which completely sucks somewhere where nobody has an a/c and your living space is directly under the roof having sun throughout the day and evening). Anyway, the guy apparently wasn't bothered by the cold.

What I didn't get is that he didn't even sound drunk. I mean I semi-frequently hear drunks shouting and singing alone and in groups, but those stagger by quickly, and don't annoy me that much, but this one stuck nearby for a while.

[chicago-h.livejournal.com]

Huh. I always assume central Europe is more similar in climate to the American midwest than it apparently is, probably because I always forget how small Europe is. The mitigating effects of the ocean are closer in all directions than anything save the Great Lakes here (and for people on the back side of the Lakes, the "mitigating effects" of a large body of water consist of feet and feet of snow. Happily, I'm on the windward side, so we're spared the worst of the lake-effect snow). At any rate, I'm glad your unwelcome serenader drifted off. :)

[ratcreature]

Well, I guess it depends on what you see as "central" too. I mean, for example Poland tends to have more continal climate than here, and even some parts of Germany towards the East and or South are often a bit colder in Winter than here. And well, there's the Gulf Stream, which after all hasn't collapsed from global warming yet, making Europe warmer than the US. Also, while I'm not directly at the coast, it's quite near to both the North and the Baltic Sea, so while the latitude is that of Southern Alaska, if I had to compare the climate to somewhere in the US it would probably be Seattle? Mild, somewhat rainy, not so much in absolute quantity of rain as in that it's often cloudy and with a bit of a drizzle, and combined with the northern latitude that means you see very little of the sun.