Noise Annoys

New York recieved about seven inches of snow last night. As I type I look out of the office window at myriad tree branches picked out in stark white, intricate webs of ice crystals, adorning nature's beauty. And there is a snowblower somewhere which is doing my nut.

If you live in the middle of the desert, or in a country where the snow doesn't arrive in sufficient quantities to warrant snowblowers being marketed at you, allow me to quickly illustrate.

It's like a lawnmower with a petrol engine, and what it does is as you push it along, it WHOOOOSHES the snow up off the ground, swirls it around inside itself a couple of times and then BOOOSH it blows it off and away out of a little chimney which the user can direct. Very handy for clearing paths through snow without all that backbreaking shovelling and/or employing local waifs and strays.

For the last two hours there has been a snowblower a-goin' somewhere nearby, out the back of the run of buildings which makes up our street. TWO HOURS. I'm sitting here attempting to come up with a job application cover letter which doesn't use the cliched, 'I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience' and someone is blowing snow for all their worth.
That's not the thing though. The noise isn't so bad, but what is really mullering my yoghurt is trying to figure out why someone has been blowing snow in a back garden measuring about ten feet by ten feet for two hours.

Are they simple? Have they trained the little chimney to blow snow to the other side of their yard, meaning they go round and round and round in circles, blowing snow which has already been blown, over and over again? What in hell's name is going on?

The snow is now coming down in a Hollywood style - fat flakes langourously falling with big gaps between them.

But our errant snowblowee brings me onto something else. I've been in the apartment a lot over the past few months, and I'm getting very curious to see what the other apartments in our building look like by now, because of the hammering.

The Hammering (soon to be a book by Stephen King) has been going on ever since I moved in, and in such staggering amounts that I now think that the apartment below ours has walls which are armour plated...or one picture which has been re-hung so many times that the walls look like they have been attacked by a squadron of kamikaze woodpeckers. There can be no other explanation.