New House Noises

Two weeks after moving to this house, I'm beginning to get used to its noises. Most of the noises have been of the nocturnal sort. In the beginning, these noises sent my heart to beating faster, but now they're becoming more familiar.

The neighbor has a peacock which especially likes to coo at night. Sometimes it sounds like it's right outside our bedroom window. I've noticed that any kind of disturbance gets the peacock going--along with all the neighborhood dogs. This past Sunday night about 10 p.m. I heard the sound of BIG fireworks going off. They seemed really close and definitely sounded illegal. The sound of the fireworks rustled the peacocks feathers--he was really letting loose. I read in the paper the next morning that the local baseball team had its season opener the night before and fireworks were part of the celebration.

Like clockwork, at 3:45 a.m., the neighbor's rooster begins cock-a-doodle-doing. He goes on and on until about 5 a.m. Then the pheasants take over. We have about seven roosters around here. We've even spotted a pheasant family with ten babies.

I also sometimes hear a train at night. This noise is actually a comforting one to me as I grew up in a small town where the trains passed through about twenty times per day.

Of course there are all the inside noises a house makes. I hear the cracking of the laminate floors at night (I wouldn't have known what that was except someone told me). The heat pump is right outside our bedroom and the furnace is downstairs underneath our bedroom so I hear those turn on and off all night.

Pregnancy exacerbates my already light sleep habits. No one else in the family has commented on any "new house noises," but I've been privileged to hear them all.