Nighttime Noises

My eyes snapped open at about 11:30 last night when someone started up what sounded like a lawn mower quite close to our house. I thought to myself how odd it was that someone was testing out a lawn mower so late at night. I assumed it was only a test - how could anyone possibly mow the lawn in the dark?

But the sound of the motor did not go away. I could even hear the difference in pitch from the machine being moved and turned repeatedly. It just kept going and going. Was someone really mowing the lawn at 11:30 at night?

I couldn't stand it - I had to go check. I got up and peeked out our bedroom window and saw a man in a safety vest holding a little flag. He was standing in the middle of the road in front of my house, staring at the crosswalk, which was in the process of being painted by another guy in a safety vest. The painting machine was my mystery lawn mower.

Weird.

Last week I had been awakened at 5am by what sounded like a long convoy of trucks driving past my house. It was not a great night - the power had gone out around 4am, which was a bad thing for two reasons.

Reason 1: The next day was my very first day of work, and my alarm clock needed to wake me up on time, which it could not do if the power was out.

Reason 2: Mark's work computer has an Uninterruptable Power Supply, which is a fancy name for a backup battery that keeps running for maybe 10 minutes in the event of a power outage. It allows you to save your work and safely turn off your computer. It also emits a loud beep every five seconds when the power goes out.

So there I was at about 4am last Monday morning, staring at my blank alarm clock and listening to the loud beeps from Mark's office. He was out of town, so I had to drag myself out of bed and go turn his computer off.

Maybe a half an hour later, the power came back on. I reset my alarm and went back to sleep. Another half hour after that, and it suddenly sounded like a convoy of trucks was driving past my house. Our street is very quiet normally, and doesn't really lead to anywhere that a convoy of trucks would need to go. After a while my curiosity won and I got out of bed to look out the window.

It was not, in fact, a convoy of trucks. It was a street sweeper. He was sweeping the street. Over. And over. And over again.

I guess he wanted it to be really clean.