Beer Can Serenade

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

As a child growing up, I was caught in the rain several times, but always had the option to go home or otherwise seek shelter. As an adult in the service, there was more than one occasion where I had to simply endure the rain to do the task at hand. The biggest difference was that as a child, when it was time to sleep I was always "indoors" and "in bed", although sometimes the indoors was a tent, and the bed was a sleeping bag. In the Army sometimes even that amount of luxury was missing.

It is indeed luxury to be out of the rain in a warm bed and able to listen to the rain falling, and roar of thunder after the flash of lightening, and just snuggle down deeper into your blanket. Most of us go through our lives not realizing just how much of a luxury it is to be able to sleep in a warm dry place.

Last night, however, was not so nice.

I have a neighbor (new one for this college semester) who likes to party on the weekends. That does not bother me. What bothers me is that, being college students, he and his friends have a lackadaisical attitude towards things like "property". There is a small stretch of fence from the end of the apartment wall that is my apartment to the large connex that sits right behind my apartment. My neighbor and his friends consider this a good, and less labor intensive, place to dispose of their beer cans. Simply tossing them over the wall. The area they are tossing the cans into is completely enclosed (why the owners have fenced this area off I do not know, but they have). The cans are out of sight, and thus pretty much out of everyone's mind.

Except that it rained last night.

Rainwater coming down at an angle does not land in the area between the connex and the building wall, the space is just too narrow. But it does collect on top of the connex and the apartment building, and after a bit really big drips start falling from those heights onto the cans below.

I cannot tell you how annoyingly noisy the result was.

I have dozed on rifle ranges, and during mortar live fires when I was not specifically needed. This noise was insufferable. I could reach the wall and see the cans through the slats, and four years ago I could climb that fence to get inside, but now I cannot.

I got virtually no sleep last night as a result.

My neighbor? Well his apartment is across the breezeway, so his bedroom is all the way on the other side of the building from the noise, he slept with no problems at all.

I was nearly driven to my car to try to sleep, but the rain finally stopped at about 4:30, and the water stopped dripping about a half hour after that. Now I have to find someway to get the cans cleared out, and more importantly to stop a repeat of the incident.