You’re not gonna believe this. Before the excavator-mounted jackhammer could finish clearing out the new basement hole four doors up, a crew at their neighbors across the street started foundation work with a hand-held jackhammer. And tomorrow, a site that was cleared today (bye, bye Fortune Panda!) will begin jackhammering. It is five doors down in the other direction. That hole is gonna have to be deep enough to accommodate parking for the twelve-apartments that they’ll be building on top of it.
Seven a.m. is when the percussive banging started every day this week. The throatier, more intermittent hand-held jackhammering started at around one and went til five.
We might need to leave. It’s really possible.
Finn and I escaped briefly in some nearby woods. It was otherwise a spectacularly beautiful day.
The stone being jackhammered, I may have mentioned, is Roxbury Puddingstone (or conglomerate). This morning I looked it up. Among other things I learned that Roxbury was once called “Rocksbury.”
This is nerdy of me, I know, but I found the geology interesting — or rather, I liked the feel of these words in my mouth. Such a wholly other vocabulary. Even though the words don’t mean all that much to me, I’ll bet this Wikipedia excerpt would make a great writing prompt.
Because of the noise, I was once again relegated to the basement for a zoom session. My chair sits near a bureau piled high with magazine pages and collage supplies and so while waiting for class to begin I found myself gluing shit down, playing. The first one is another Two of Pentacles, I think.
The second one (above) is commentary about the climate crisis, which I also ended up writing about.
Holy shit.
There is absolutely NO WAY I could handle that shit!!!!! 😵💫🙉
Noise cancelling headphones help. I’m going to visit a friend in Lincoln tomorrow.
Man oh man!!! That would drive me nuts, although I listen to babies crying much of the day 😉 So sorry you have to deal with this. ~Nancy
We have kid noise too. Not crying but sometimes close to an hour of girls screaming at the top of their voices.
WOW. I hope you can hold out and stay where you are, but I can understand wanting to find a quiet place. We left a quiet place where we could no longer justify paying the property tax. We sleep thanks to the constant noise cancelling hum of a fan. Where to go, tho? Is there anywhere to escape that is affordable?? I mean for anyone who, 10 years ago, considered themselves as financially fairly safe? And where does leave people who were poor 10 years ago? Who’s revealing the truth of that situation? Where is the money behind this coming from, I’m wondering, and who can track it, Jack and a team of thousands…? I am nothing but suspicious of developers. This is normal in NJ, yet it’s much much worse than ever before. Who’s funding the constant destruction of beautiful old neighborhoods (like yours), and building warehouses the size of several football fields across perfectly good farm land, when we are not looking. Ha: why aren’t we looking? It’s impossible to keep track of it all. And why has dRump not been charged with treason TODAY? I mean, I’ve been finding reasons why he should be, since about 2016. But, after this latest (read RCR) “reveal”? Sorry to rant. I have several busy days ahead and this is my favorite place to vent and here I am. I am not giving up hope. xoxoxo
Vent away! Seriously. It’s something I think about. When we downsize, how will we even know if the new neighborhood is quiet? Many of the properties in this area being bought up by the Chinese. With cash, no less. Newton is moving toward becoming more urban, like Brookline. Nothing wrong with that per se, I just don’t want to listen to it all. We been here for the development of a huge track of marsh, just across Route 9, for the felling of many acres of trees next to the school (for Newton Terraces). There’s Maple Estates (right next to where the new 12-apartment building is going), Langley townhomes (three) and more.
I still wake up to the 430am CSX train coming through the crossing about a half mile away.
I was sitting on the back deck when I read this. The feral rooster that lives beyond our creek is starting to sound old. A passenger jet, still at plus 15K feet, passed over – a grumbled whisper.
I would go mad if if I were you.
My tolerance for noise has dropped coincident with projects on the increase. It’s tough. Blessedly not a single of the three jackhammers that I expected to be operating today are.
Jack hammering is one of the worst of neighborhood noises. I can’t imagine being surrounded by construction noise now. I hope you’ll be able to escape some of it, and that it doesn’t last long.
Your art is interesting. I especially enjoy the Two of Pentacles, though I don’t know Tarot.
I dig your haiku from earlier, too.
(Sometimes, my comments here go poof. I wish I knew why. Maybe because I sometimes get interrupted, or go to an email or website, and when I come back to finish my comment it’s gone.)
I wish I knew why comments went poof too. Maybe I don’t check my spam folder often enough.
We sold our Princeton house, made out ok, not great – our realtor(R) I came to dislike intensely. Hardly anyone came to look at our house, R made it look “shabby chic” from Walmart and it was gross. Did I rant about this before? Did I tell you that the buyer (after a year of doing nothing and no sign of anyone having moved in) applied for a variance to tear down and rebuild the house. The neighbors went ape-shit. They got together like I’d never seen. We stayed out of it but were very pleased that they won a series of arguments with the planning board and against the buyers to leave the original structure of the house alone – allow additions and renovations of course, but not to destroy a perfectly sound home built in 1924 (or something close to that). It was sold again and purchased the real estate agent who has renovated it and rents it – probably for very pretty penny each month. Not that she doesn’t deserve it, she is savvy and she raised her kids by herself. If you want to stay, you might want to start a neighbor petition and submit it to the planning board?
I did not know this history. Our street is zoned for single family, so the house will be a house. It’s just unbelievable how big they’ve been building them.
Holy moly. That level of noise would be intolerable for me if it went on every day. What an aggravation. We live in a rural area but it is close to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, home to the loudest airplanes in the world- F-18’s. Fortunately, we are out of the immediate noise ring of the airfield, but twice a month or so (impossible to predict) the flight pattern goes right over our house and the thundering jets make conversation impossible. The base has been there for my entire life and everyone around here is used to it, and used to complaining about it, but the number and noisiness of the jets have increased very much through the years. If the noise were every day we wouldn’t be able to live here. I think plain old noisiness is one of the main anxiety amplifiers of modern life.
Military jets are VERY loud! I totally agree with your last statement.
You never know where the noise will be do you? We once went to Deer Isle up in Maine for a vacation. A beautiful old house in a quiet location. Little known to us and the owner never told us that there was a house being built right next door. It was constant noise all day long. So much for our Maine vacation. We ended up leaving early because we could not take it.
Oh man that would’ve been disappointing.
It’s on my end, I’m pretty sure. I can’t finish my comment if I have to check my spelling, check an email, or look up an issue before I reply intelligently. When I return to finish my well-thought-out, lengthy, and brilliant reply 🤪, poof–it’s gone!
A fellow-distractible!
here the jackhammering is done with a bobcat sort of vehicle … to break through the limestone that lies mere inches below the thin topsoil … all in service of making more swimming pools (never mind that we are in near perpetual drought) … the only sound worse is the incessant beep-beep-beep sounding the reverse (perverse?) warnings of the heavy equipment leveling the ground for yet another development … the trees that might muffle the sound long gone in service of “progress” … fiddling while Rome burns
I’ve read that the piercing backup beep doesn’t even really save lives. Construction workers become inured to the sound and delivery people get sloppy if employed. I wake up to the sound four out of 7 mornings. Unlike leaf blowers which have about a five yard distance of annoyance, truck beeping travels at least a 1/4 mile.
beep beep beep (that would be me backing up to take ownership of the Anonymous comment) … Liz A (just in case WordPress anonymizes me again)