Mornings the din is continuous, then intermittent till late afternoon. Catercorner they split a lot and a little house is being erected, or a luxury hotel/casino for dolls, or a habitat for rhesus monkeys. The noise of course is annoying, especially the jackhammers. Jackhammers are the vain superstars of noise, trumped only by those mysterious explosions I used to hear coming from San Francisco Bay in the middle of the night. When I lived in San Francisco that is. F had a splitting headache and then heard the jackhammers and felt affronted by the banality, life imitating an aspirin commercial. I often think I make out patterns in the machine racket, banshee wails or teletype clacking or eerie intonations like the Conet Project numbers stations recordings; I could so easily be hypnotized, I'd go under in no time. It's not so bad if we close the windows but how can we close the windows with this heat. I lived for years without a crossbreeze and I'm not going to give it up even if it means sacrificing my daily siesta. Upstairs J felt apocalyptic jolts and ran down waving his arms to announce an earthquake but it turned out to be the backhoe. The convulsive drama: great quantities of earth moved, trees violently uprooted, Honey Bucket Tufway portable sanitation units entered and exited.