The Hummingman

When you go apartment-hunting or house-hunting, there are always a thousand different things that you can never know about a building until you live in it.

For instance, our new condo has central air-conditioning vents that enable us to hear our downstairs neighbor. We can never make out what she's saying, exactly - it kind of sounds like what Charlie Brown's teachers say during a Peanuts cartoon show.

These past few months, our neighbor has been renovating her bathroom. Her handyman hums bad R&B while he tiles her bathroom, and it's been driving the dogs a bit batty. I think that they believe the humming noises belong to a puppy who is being tortured in the downstairs bathroom. My dogs run around in circles and whine. Occasionally, they will come up to me with a look of concern on their faces and I can almost hear them say, "Well, aren't you going to DO something about that?"

The thing is, that today the handyman was talking to my neighbor in the bathroom and I could hear EVERY WORD CLEAR AS A BELL.

Because she is a single mom lady, and I've never heard her talk to anyone while she's been in the bathroom before, I never realized that the vents in the bathroom are completely un-sound-proof. Which got me to thinking - that she hears me every time Peter's in there and I shout, "HEY! Are you POOPING in there?"