Farewell Latvians, hello bagpipers

I slept through a fire alarm. Again.

The bells in the hallway rang a few weeks ago in the early morning hours. Amanda woke up. I didn't. So, she woke me up to tell me the fire alarm was going off. I went back to sleep. Thankfully it was a false alarm, as she was able to see courtesy of the TV's Lobby Camera Channel. Yes, I caught hell for it later -- it's impolite to allow your nearest and dearest to assume full responsibility for your smoky and/or fiery death just because you sleep with earplugs in.

I slept through another alarm when at a hotel. I think it was in Calgary for the launch of 660News. I went to work the next day and the rest of the crew was complaining of exhaustion from the fire alarm and evacuation. I slept right through it because I sleep with earplugs in.

It hasn't always been this way. I believe I started with the earplugs back when I lived in Toronto. The mid-century highrise where I lived decided to restore all the balconies. That meant several summers of jackhammering the hell out of the concrete all day, every day. And at the time, I think I was working a morning shift...or an evening shift...some shift that involved me wanting to sleep during the day. The earplugs didn't completely help. Jackhammers on concrete tend to reverberate through a structure in a way that snoring partners can't even emulate.

I continued with the earplugs because of snoring partners.

Rewinding through history, my nighttime noise-shaping began with a filter fan. Y'know, an air filter to screen out the dust. I may have had some kind of dust allergy. The filter rarely got replaced -- vacuumed every couple of months -- so it became more of a noisemaker than an air purifier.

I took that with me when I moved out, and it conditioned the ambient noise (or lack of it) for years until the fan gave up and started sounding more like an outboard fishing boat engine than a blissful blanket of white noise.

Christmas, if I recall correctly, brought a gift from mom and dad in the form of a noise generator. I pretty much stuck with the plain ol' white noise, although it had various selections from nature. This being the 1990s, the sound samples were a little meh. They were loops, and if you listened, you could hear the loop points. Some of the samples sounded decidedly unnatural.

Well, along comes the new digital world. We have ipods and tivos and key chains that show pictures. Shouldn't there be a next generation of White Noise Machines?

Whaddya know, there are ... er, there IS! Here's a video to prove it:

The link is brought to you by the folks at Vat19, pitching what they call "Curiously Awesome Gifts" (a slogan the folks at Altoids have not sued them over, as far as I can tell). They also have other doodads such as Foot Cozy Heated Slippers. Geek stuff, neat stuff, and stuff you could give people that they'd think was cool but would never actually use, but remember you fondly for all time for thinking of something so unique. You get the idea.

Now, to the present. The Latvian hockey fans went home a while ago. And now we approach the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo, with its bagpipe bands, brass bands, drum bands and flaming jugglers. The jugglers and mimes don't bother me when I sleep, but the rest of them do their rehearsals outside my apartment window in the early morning hours.

Y'know what? Earplugs don't cut it. Pillows don't cut it. Windows don't cut it. But maybe, just maybe, some white noise plus those other things will let me rest through the tumult. Completely unlikely, but maybe.