I don’t spend an exorbitant amount of time at home generally, but I spend enough.  Almost a year ago, Ruth and I moved into our current apartment and we have been very happy with it.  Around the time that we moved in, and within the next few months there was a fairly sizable turnover of residents in the complex (two, four unit, single floor buildings).  There were two empty units when we moved in, and I know that at least two others turned over.  The apartment next to us was vacated a couple months after we moved in and sat empty until right before Christmas.

Other than just saying “hi” in passing, I don’t really know our new next door neighbors.  I am pretty sure that they do some work for the landlord as I believe that they shovel the snow and do yard-work and such.  We had one run in with them when they hooked up their washer and dryer and proceeded to flood both of your apartments.  This was not their fault, but it sure was a bummer.  All the rest of what I know about them comes from what we hear through the walls, and boy let me tell you, sometimes it is a lot.

Either our walls are really thin or they are just really loud, or possibly a combination of both.  Sometimes I wonder how happily married this couple actually is because it seems like most mornings they are going at it.  I know that they have at least one young kid as well who gets yelled at a lot too.  It is nice that the shared wall is between our living rooms and not bedrooms!

I am not a parent, but I have to wonder when it seems like all these people are giving this kid is negative reinforcement.  The other day I heard what was probably a computer game or DVD and it seemed like the whole thing was “don’t do this” and “don’t do that.”  Is this really the way to teach kids?  I thought that just saying “No” was one of those things that is less effective.  I know from working at summer camp and for lifeguard training that you should not be completely negative if you want to get good results.  Sure, sometimes you have to lay down some rules with what is not allowed, but not all the time right?

In general I don’t think that the noisy neighbors bother me as much here at my current apartment as at the old apartment.  There I had people living above, below and on one side.  The person above me insisted on blasting loud music on sunday mornings.  It was odd, just one song, and generally they were not bad songs, it was just weird.  I don’t have have to put up with elephants upstairs now either.  I just really wonder about people who spend so much time in apparent competition with eachother.

…and how late 2009 tries to kill the A Cappella genre of music.

So I finally have had the chance to start watching NBC’s new show, “The Sing Off” over the past couple nights. I probably wouldn’t have watched it except that my father called me up and told me that his company, VideoLink, shot all the Boston footage of the group from Tufts University, the Beelzebubs. I still have yet to watch the final episode, but it has kinda been a relative love-hate relationship between me and the show, and I am not sure that I would watch it again if they do another season.

Lets start with the fact that this is a show about singing and singing groups. Each episode is two hours long and each group only got maybe two minutes for each song (and they only did one song each in the first episode. You hear more music in an hour of American Idol (once you get through the first couple rounds) than in this show. These a cappella groups worked really hard and some travelled pretty far to get to the show and they are singing a maximum of four minutes each in a two hour show. That would be 32 minutes of singing in 120 minutes of show (if all eight groups performed two songs). What is up with that? We want to watch the show for the music, not the stories and the talking.