I'm reading this to the sounds of the kids running upstairs. It's my landlady and her kids but even so I wouldn't complain about them running around on an afternoon.

My parents' next-door neighbor had been out sometimes with the three-year-old at like 5 am, but they figured dad was doing a great favor to his pregnant wife (now no longer pregnant! amazing), so didn't mind.

Yeah, we are frequently up at 6:30-7 on weekends (as well as during the week - actually, my idiot kids get up earlier on the weekends than during the week when they have to, grrr), and I feel guilty about that, but what can I do? So it was sort of disconcerting to get yelled at at noon.

see, kids laughing - that's beyond the pale.

but I am a loud laugher and my grandmother used to be teased for laughing. I cannot truck people being angry about laughing if it isn't AT someone.

go fuck yourselves anti-laughers.

as far as kids running around, I get it, but if you are in a multiple-family dwelling, you aren't in a monastery, you have to deal with other people.

le nubian, you are not crazy. The Tuareg are a nomadic people of the Sahara, for whom, I presume, the car was named.

I dunno, I get that you can't make kids not run, and sometimes sound travels, but I have memories of my BFF's old apartment where I swear, there were herds of small elephant kids rolling bowling balls ALL DAY LONG--even until after 10PM, when we'd be like "OMG seriously shouldn't those kids be asleep by now??". It was seriously annoying--not because of the time of day, but because it seemed to go on ALWAYS.

I'm listening to my upstairs neighbor walking around right now, AIFG! Well, not quite that, but it's 2:45 in the afternoon here and there's footsteps--so what? It's not like I'm huddled in the corner gong, "The steps, the steps, the terrible cacaphony of the steps!" You live in an apartment, you'll hear your neighbors. As long as its not 3 am and it doesn't make you have to turn up the telly, it's no big.

I'm glad there's only one set of kids in the apartment building right now. I moved in here thinking it was all old people, and that therefore I'd be the noise hazard, but for a while there the shared spaces were all kids and their toys and pounding footsteps all the time. I don't understand how a five year old can have such heavy footfalls.

I'd love to have the dosh to isolate myself from loud noises of all ages, but that's nowhere near in the cards.

My 5 year old really likes to hop on one foot. It's quite loud, actually. I have sympathy - we had upstairs neighbors once we nicknamed The Elephants - I swear the woman wore Candies around the house. The fact of the matter, though, is that is it virtually impossible to keep kids very quiet unless they are asleep or watching TV. We don't play loud music, stay up late, or have drunken screaming fights, but we do have kids. Sorry.

And seriously, the actual most annoying thing outside my parents' is birds, and what can you do about that? TWEET! TWEET!!!!!

When I was visiting a friend in a corporate apartment, we would swear someone was regularly dropping a large amount of ball bearings on the floor upstairs. I still wonder what that was.