For the last month or so I've been having  a little sleep problem. No, it's not insomnia, sleep apnea, RLS (although I have that but don't admit it anymore since they gave it a name) or any of that. No, what I suffer from is wake-up calls I never asked for.  The primary cause has been the phone. I now turn them off but occasionally I forget and of course on those days, it always rings.

Then there's those special days where I'm woken up by sounds you really only get woken up to in Brooklyn like the domino players across the street.

You should know that it's not really a street I live on, it's a court.  This is not your usual country court with a roundabout at one end and a decent amount of space between houses. It's more of a driveway that just ends against a brick wall with about 20, 3 apartment brownstones all crammed against eachother. Romantic and kinda pretty at first glance, until you realize you can see and hear everything that everyone does.

The domino guys? Now that was pretty cool for the first few weeks. I thought "Oh cool, just like the movies." You know what though? They play all day, every single day, and into the night.  Some people get birds, others trains and some the "chirp chirp" of crickets and peepers. Me? I get the sound of dominoes being shaken in a bag, violently I might add, every 10 minutes or so. Oh, and did you know when you play a domino, apparently you have to SLAM IT THE HELL DOWN on the table? Seriously, every domino. You gotta SLAM it!

One morning, the day before my birthday, it was fireworks coming from the apartment complex down the street. Seriously, fireworks.

This morning? Well, the phone is what woke me which is what makes the guy not seen in the photo above, a very very lucky man. If it wasn't for the phone, I might have jumped out the window, onto his head and started beating him with dominoes, because I am convinced that even those laid back fellas would have helped me.  Apparently, it's neither impolite or unreasonable to GRIND METAL off the window below my bedroom at 9:30am on a Saturday.  Sure!  Why not?

I miss the winter when all of our windows were closed and people didn't do stuff outside.