What Can You Do About Noisy Neighbors?

     My tenants are having a noise problem again. They called the other day and said they'd been woken up on Saturday night about 3 a.m. by some loud banging and thumping coming from upstairs.

     We've been through this before. The upstairs neighbors have a wooden floor. When the current tenants moved in, they had no rugs. The condo policy says at least 70% of a wooden floor has to be covered by carpeting. So eventually, after much prodding from us, the upstairs neighbors got a rug. Or so they tell us. We don't know how big the rug is, or whether it really covers 70% of the wood floor, or if there's proper padding under the rug to dampen the noise of their footsteps. We're attempting to find out through the condo association.

     The condo association has a regulation banning excessive noise, especially at night. The upstairs tenants got a letter from the condo management, asking them to please be quiet and considerate of their downstairs neighbors, especially during the hours between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. It seems they were getting the message and being considerate for while, but slipped up the other night.

     Have any of you suffered from excessive noise from neighbors? It's a bitch, isn't it?

     B and I had a conversation about this last night. But she blames my tenants. They live in an apartment building, she says, and everybody knows you get noise in an apartment building. She recalled, during her single days, renting an apartment in an old building, and actually being amazed at how quiet it was. Then one evening she came home from work, only to hear clomp, clomp, clomp on her ceiling.

     It turned out the apartment above her had been empty. Now a big strapping single guy moved in, and treated her to plenty of noise. "I remember, every night, I could hear him take off his shoes," she told me. "I'd hear a little creak from the bed as he sat down. Then, clunk, as he took off one shoe. And another clunk, as he took off the other one."

     She continued, "But what do you do? You live in an apartment. Someone's right on top of you. You've got to expect some noise."

     I have more sympathy for my tenants. I recall in my divorced days, 2002 - '07, I moved into a townhouse. My next-door neighbor (we shared a wall) was a quiet guy who kept to himself, and I never heard a peep out of him. Then he sold his place. A fellow in town bought it, and moved his sister-in-law in, with her two children and two dogs.

     The kids were fine. But the dogs were a horror. I don't know what kind they were; but they were tall and sleek, weighing probably around 80 pounds. They had short hair and big mouths. And they used them. Every time a neighbor walked past her townhouse, the two dogs would jump at her windows and bark aggressively, lunging at the glass. Then she would tie them up outside (against the development's policy), and when people went by they charged toward them until they were stopped by the end of their chains, and again, lunge and bark aggressively until the person got at least 100 feet away.

     I complained a dozen times to the woman; and another several times to the management. Fortunately, some other residents also complained (lending credence to my story, so I didn't come across as just a complaining neighbor). After about six months, the woman finally moved out. I don't know what went on behind the scenes, or who talked to her, or her brother-in-law, the owner. But she was gone. The place eventually went back on the market; a normal person bought it and moved in.

     Currently, at our house, we have a next-door neighbor with a dog. The neighbors have a fenced-in backyard and they occasionally let their dog out. And he barks. But it doesn't bother us. He's not outside very much, and he only barks when he sees another dog, which isn't that often. And also, their dog is not ten feet away from us; he's 100 feet away, and we barely hear him when we're inside our house, especially in the winter with the windows closed. Plus ... our dog is in love with the next-door neighbor's dog. It's cute!

     So, I don't know what's going to happen with my tenant. Noise levels are pretty subjective things. What bothers one person may not bother another. And how many rules can you put in to ensure peace and quiet? If people are noisy and inconsiderate, is anything going to make them easy to live with?

     People complain about the noise level of the political scene. But you can turn off your TV; you can avoid the nasty, opinionated websites. You can't get away from your noisy neighbor.

The Problem with Our Economy

     I sometimes think that the modern notion of "economic growth" is fiction. The experts tell us our economy is much bigger now than it was when we were kids. Economists obsess about GDP, and whether it's gone up 2 percent or 3 percent, and measure how per capita income is higher (although not that much higher) than it was a decade ago, or two decades ago.

     But it seems to me that economic growth is based largely on accounting for things that in the old days we just didn't account for. A mother used to stay home and take care of her own kids. She wasn't getting paid; the activity wasn't counted in the economy. Now she works outside the home and gets a paycheck, and then turns around and pays someone else to look after her kids.

     We used to take in Grandma when she got old. Now we pay an Independent Living facility to take care of her. We used to fix our own cars; now someone else does it. We used to do our own taxes; now we pay an accountant. We used to save for our own retirement; now there's such a dizzying array of options that we need the experts to do it for us. A lot of so-called economic activity. But are we any better off? Maybe a little ... but not as much as we think.

     Nobody produces anything anymore. We all just pay one another to do things that we won't or can't do for ourselves. People in Asia make our cars, our computers and our Christmas ornaments. We drive people around, give people advice, process information, offer people therapy, or help them with their finances.

     This is what I thought. Then I read Boomerang by Michael Lewis, the respected author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball and The Big Short. And I discovered the problem is worse than I thought. It's true, nobody produces anything anymore. But otherwise, we all just work the system.

     Lewis is very smart, very funny and very cynical. He reviews the recent debt cycle and shows how different countries, from Iceland to Greece, fell victim in their own different ways. But the universal problem, he concludes, is that the people who had power in society, who were supposed to run things for the common good, were instead bleeding the society to death. "It's a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences," he writes.

     But he really hits a nerve when he turns his laser eye back to the U. S., and California.

     "It's not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans," he says. "Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of society to the bottom. They grabbed as much as they could. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would bemoan the low morals of the people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans."

     And I think that's a key point. He says it's not just the greedy bankers (who the liberals blame), and it's not just the greedy public employees (who the conservatives blame.) It was, and perhaps still is, everybody.

     Lewis focuses on Arnold Schwarzenegger who in his opinion tried mightily to put California on a sane financial path -- and failed miserably. "He tried everything he could to persuade California state legislators to vote against the short-term desires of their constituents for the greater long-term good of all," Lewis argues. Legislators acknowledged that the state had big problems and that the governor proposed some reasonable ideas to solve them, but they wouldn't vote for any of them because in every case a powerful interest group would get mad at them and threaten their chances for re-election.

     California has highly partisan legislative districts and voters elect highly partisan people to office. The legislators, beholden to their special interests, cannot compromise or agree on anything. So nothing gets done. The voters become disgusted. And yet, the system ended up working very well in giving Californians exactly what they wanted -- a lot of services for many different constituents and better salaries for public employees -- all without anyone having to pay for it because the government just took on more debt.

     In San Jose the problem finally bubbled over after public safety workers used union power, binding arbitration and sympathetic judges to make deals that included pay raises over 20 percent, extra pay for "terrorist training" and generous retirement programs. "Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working," said San Jose's Democratic mayor, who asked, "When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working?"

     The result: In order to pay the pension costs, San Jose had to cut a quarter of its workforce, from 7,400 workers to 5,400 workers. The libraries were closed three days a week, and parks got no maintenance.

     How will it all end? In Vallejo, CA, when public workers took 80 percent of the city's budget for their pay packages, it finally ended in bankruptcy. Real-estate values plummeted 60 percent. Creditors settled on 5 cents to the dollar, and public employees were paid off at around 25 cents on the dollar. The fire department  was cut from 121 to 67 employees, who were left to handle 13,000 calls a year.

     Lewis is by no means one of these small-government Republicans. He is just as hard, if not harder, on the wild eyed bankers in Iceland and Ireland, and he took on Wall Street in The Big Short. He in fact has sympathy for public workers who now have to do more with less, precisely because of the government's financial problems. The irony is that those who pushed for better pay for public employees -- beyond what the tax base could support -- were the very ones who in the end caused the layoffs and cuts in services.

     What happens when a society loses its ability to regulate itself, Lewis asks, when everyone is sacrificing their long-term interests for a short-term reward? One possible outcome is that the environment will regulate us -- and the environment regulates by starvation, like farmers who fail to fertilize and rotate crops and thus leach out their land. Or ... like what happened to the people in Vallejo, CA.

     The other way is to realize what we have been doing to ourselves in this country, then come together and regulate our own activities -- when leaders will run things for the common good, instead of lining their own pockets at the public trough, and when regular people take more pride in their contributions to the community than they do in accumulating paid sick days for early retirement.

Family Fights

    B came home this evening and reported that she'd had lunch with a friend of hers today. I know her friend, and her family, a little bit anyway. And so I asked: Any news?

     B told me that her friend's sister-in-law is getting divorced. It's strange, reflected B, because this woman had lived with the man for about ten years before they got married. Then they had a baby. Now the kid is eight years old, and they're getting a divorce.

     Hmmm, yeah, that's kind of strange, I agreed. Seems like they could have figured out after ten years whether they were compatible or not. But, you know, a kid changes things.

     B shook her head. Well, I've met this woman, she said. And I can see how it might be kind of difficult to live with her.

     I laughed. Yep, that's strange.

     But that's not the really strange thing I wanted to tell you about, said B. What happened was, my friend told me that she's friends with this other couple. And they have another couple they're friends with, and the two couples and their families went on vacation together over Christmas. I guess their families had been on vacation together before, several times, but this time the two sons got into a fight. The boys are around 22 or 23 years old. They've been friends their entire lives. And they got into a fight. Over a girl.

     Apparently, the kids had been drinking, and they got into an argument and ended up outside in the hotel parking lot in a fist fight. One of the boys was knocked unconscious. When he came to, he got up and went after his friend with a bottle. He hit him, he broke the bottle, cut his friend and drew blood. Both the boys ended up in the hospital.

     B and I both shook our heads. How do two kids who've been friends for their whole lives end up getting into a real fist fight? Not just a shoving match, or yelling at each other. But punching each other until they were bleeding and knocked out and taken to the hospital?

     I remember the last fight I had. I was in sixth grade. I lost. I'll tell you about it sometime. But the point is, I was 12 years old, not in my 20s.

     I do recall, once, two of my uncles getting into a fight. When they were in their 40s. We were at a family gathering -- it must have been Thanksgiving, when my grandmother was still alive and the whole group got together at my aunt's house and played touch football and hiked in the woods behind my aunt's house and spent the rest of the afternoon eating and -- yeah, the adults did a little drinking, too.

     My dad's family was a large immigrant family with lots of kids -- my dad had three brothers and two sisters. They were a competitive bunch, especially the males, and even I knew as a child that they had lots of built-up resentments, because the two older brothers were more successful than the two younger brothers, and they were richer, and they felt that they were better than their two younger brothers and made no secret about it.

     And I remember one day I was sitting outside on my aunt's front porch, and my dad's older brother was arguing with one of the younger brothers -- I think it was something about their kids. And get this -- the younger brother had had polio as a kid, and now walked with a cane, but suddenly he lunged at his older brother, pushed him back and shoved him up against a stone wall, yelling at him all the time, until my grandmother stomped out of the house and called to them to stop, right this minute -- and my dad, who was the skinniest and nerdiest of the bunch, finally ran up and stepped between them.

     But that was, literally, 50 years ago. And a rough-hewn immigrant family. By now, I thought, fighting was a lost art -- that we've all become too civilized to actually get into a fist fight anymore. Instead, we argue, harbor resentments, talk behind people's backs, pass on malicious gossip, withhold affection or give our enemies the silent treatment.

     I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm just wondering:  Have you gotten into any fights lately? What is really worth coming to blows about? Fighting over a girl? Over money? Over long-held resentments? It all seems like something out of an old black-and-white movie, not something that happened last week over Christmas vacation, among modern, civilized, suburban middle-class families.

Answers to: Are These Baby Boomer Icons Dead or Alive?

     A few have passed on, but many are still with us, living out their lives in peace and obscurity. How many did you get right?

     1)  George McGovern remained in the U. S. Senate after his 1972 defeat. He was reelected in 1974, but lost in 1980. He entered the Democratic presidential primaries in 1984 but dropped out after trailing Gary Hart and Walter Mondale. McGovern went on the lecture circuit and focused on fighting world hunger. His daughter Teresa, an alcoholic, fell into a snowbank in Madison, WI, in 1992 and died of hypothermia. His wife, Eleanor, died in 2007. But George McGovern is still alive at age 89, living in Mitchel, SD, and St. Augustine, Fl, where he continues to write and lecture.

     2)  Geraldine Ferraro twice ran for the U. S. Senate from New York, after her losing bid for the vice presidency. She faltered both times, in part because of her husband, who pleaded guilty to fraud and was later accused (but acquitted) of bribing a Queens politician. Ferraro remained active in Democratic politics and supported women's causes, and in the 1990s President Clinton named her U. S. Ambassador to the U. N. Commission on Human Rights. In 1998 she was diagnosed with bone cancer, and she died in March 2011 at age 75. She is survived by her husband, a son and two daughters.

     3) Pat Boone, a devout Christian, remained active in country and Gospel music from the 1950s through the 1990s. He and his wife Shirley had four daughters, one of whom, Debby, had her own career highlighted by the 1977 megahit "You Light Up My Life." Pat Boone has been active in Republican politics; he has hosted a long-running charity golf tournament in Chattanooga, TN, and also, as a well-known basketball fan, has been part owner of two basketball teams. At age 77, Boone currently lives with long-time wife Shirley in Los Angeles.

     4)  Fess Parker leaped to fame playing Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, a Disney miniseries in 1954 and 1955, and went on to portray Daniel Boone on TV from 1964 to 1970. In the 1980s Parker became a real-estate developer, building a resort hotel in Santa Barbara, CA, and later a winery and vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara. He died at age 85, in 2010, and is survived by his wife and two children.

     5) Michael Crichton was already wildly popular by the time Jurassic Park came out in 1990. He'd written his first medical thriller, The Andromeda Strain, while still a student at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s. He went on to write a dozen bestselling books, several movie scripts, and the NBC TV medical drama "ER". His controversial 2004 book State of Fear questioned the politically correct concern about global warming. Crichton was diagnosed with throat cancer early in 2008 and he died on Nov. 4, 2008 at age 66.

     6)  Sophia Loren, who won the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Two Women, was one of the most popular movie actresses of the 1950s and 1960s. She scaled back her acting after she became a mother, and instead branched out to cookbooks, eyewear, jewellry and perfume. Her longtime husband, Carlo Ponti, died in 2007, but Ms. Loren is still very much alive, with two sons and three grandchildren. She lives in Switzerland, with other homes in Naples and Rome.

     7)  Sidney Poitier, the first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field, went on to star in To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He later directed several movies, including the popular comedy Stir Crazy with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Poitier, whose parents were from the Bahamas, was appointed Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1974, and later served as "nonresident" Bahamian ambassador to Japan. In 2009 Sir Sidney was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. A prostate cancer survivor, Poitier, now 84, lives in California.

     8) Chubby Checker, famous for his 1960 song "The Twist," went on to record "Twistin' USA" and "Let's Twist Again" and "Slow Twisting" and "Twist It Up." But he did not do "The Peppermint Twist" -- that was Joey Dee and the Starliters. In 2008 "The Twist" was named the biggest single chart hit of all time by Billboard magazine. At age 70, Chubby Checker is still on tour, appearing in Oregon and Washington in January, heading to The Villages in Florida in February.

     9) Willie Mays retired from baseball in 1973, and was elected into the baseball Hall of Fame in 1979. In retirement Mays became an accomplished amateur golfer (with a 4 handicap), worked for an Atlantic City casino, and went on to serve as Special Assistant to the President of the San Francisco Giants. He currently lives in California and also serves on the Advisory Board of Baseball Assistance Team, a nonprofit organization that helps former baseball players with financial and health problems.

    10) Peter Benchley, grandson of the famous humorist and Algonquin Round Table cofounder Robert Benchley, worked at the Washington Post and Newsweek before writing the bestseller Jaws, and then co-writing the screenplay for the movie, the top-grossing film of 1975. Benchley went on to pen The Deep, The Island and The Beast, but nothing could plumb the mysteries of the depths like his seminal shark tale. He was an active environmentalist and supported Wildaid, an organization protecting sharks. Benchley died in 2006 at age 66 of pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lung tissue, survived by a wife and three children.

    11) Elizabeth Taylor was a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States -- born of American parents, in 1932 in a London suburb. The screen legend won two Best Actress Academy Awards, for Butterfield 8 in 1960 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, and survived eight marriages (counting Richard Burton twice). She converted to Judaism and in her later years became an advocate for AIDS victims. Taylor had a history of weight gain and various health problems. In 2004 she was diagnosed with congestive heart disease. She had heart surgery in 2009, and died of heart failure in March 2011.

    12) Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress, dominated the headlines in 1974 after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She later helped rob a San Francisco bank and, when arrested, she listed her occupation as "Urban Guerrilla." In 1976 she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to 7 years. She was released after serving 22 months, when her sentence was commuted by President Carter. Hearst married her former bodyguard, wrote her autobiography and produced a documentary. She currently lives in New York, where her husband is head of security for the Hearst Corp., and her daughter Lydia Hearst, 27, is a model and actress.

    13) Roger Staubach, star quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys from 1969 to 1979, turned his fame into fortune when he started a commercial real-estate business in Texas. In 2008 the Staubach Company was sold to Jones Lang LaSalle, a Chicago real-estate firm, for over $600 million. Along the way, Staubach did color commentating for CBS sports, invested in auto racing and dabbled in politics. He currently serves as executive chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle’s Americas division.

    14) Rodney Dangerfield, born Jacob Cohen in 1921, gained some respect for his 1980s movie roles, most memorably in Caddyshack, but continued his career with his moneymaking line: "I don't get no respect. No respect, no respect at all." In 2001 Dangerfield suffered a mild heart attack while backstage at "The Tonight Show." In August 2004 he went into a coma after surgery, and he died in October 2004 at the age of 82.

    15) Gladys Knight was the front person for Gladys Knight & the Pips from 1959 to 1978, when they began to record separately, and again from 1980 to 1988, after they reunited. Knight became a Mormon, and now leads an American Gospel choir. At age 67, Gladys Knight has had four husbands, and she has three children, one of whom, son Shanga, owns a chain of restaurants in the Atlanta area, Gladys Knight and Ron Winans Chicken & Waffles.

     

Blogging Boomers Carnival -- 2012!

     The first of the year Blogging Boomers Carnival brings us wishes for many happy returns from all corners of the globe and the blogosphere.

     Lucie from Midlife Musings recognizes that New Year's Eve means many things to many people -- but it's how you celebrate that makes it special. She describes the intriguing way she, herself, celebrates the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

     The Midlife Crisis Queen wonders if anyone else feels a bit of a slump once the party is over, and offers her own take on the issue in her last post of the year, "Are You Suffering from Post Holiday Let Down?"

     Ann at Contemporary Retirement offers to help out if you still haven't made your New Year's resolution. She has a thought-provoking one you can borrow from the late Duane Allman, at her post "New Year's Resolutions."

     Meanwhile, wishes for a better 2012 come from faraway Dubai. Katie Foster in the Arabian Tales and Other Adventures shines a light on Quincy Jones and his new charity single "Tomorrow/Bokra." an Arabic re-adaptation of his Grammy award winning song "Tomorrow (A Better You, A Better Me)." The song features 24 Arab artists from 16 nations harmonizing for a better tomorrow. Funds raised from the sale of "Tomorrow /Bokra" will finance arts and culture scholarships as well as projects for children throughout the Middle East and North Africa through the Quincy Jones Foundation.

     In the spirit of year-end round-ups, the Accidental Locavore offers up her top 10 list for 2011. The first half the list highlights her most popular blog posts of the year, while the second half features the Accidental Locavore's personal favorites.

     John Agno at So Baby Boomer takes on a slightly different train of thought when he points out that we don't know what we don't know -- and that can cause us and our social network friends trouble. So, he asks, what can people over age 50 do well on social networks?

     And the Vaboomer asks: Remember the Nancy Drew mysteries? Now, we Baby Boomers have our own sleuth. Her name is Sandra Troux. Read more about her and how three retired Boomers cross the world to run down art thieves and sex traffickers.

     As for my own blog, I'm featuring my annual year-end quiz -- this is a tradition that goes back a 50th of a century! Last year I did "The Baby Boomer Quiz." This year it's "Are These Baby Boomer Icons Dead or Alive?" See my last post for the questions, and my next post for the sometimes-surprising answers.

   
     And so, from blogging Boomers everywhere:  Thanks for a Bloggerific 2011. And here's to a Happy 2012!