For reasons that don’t matter I had to be somewhere at 5 o’clock this morning.
At 4:45am I was passing through a heavily residential area of West Allis. For almost 1/2 mile I heard some horrific noise. I turned my radio off and listened to make sure it wasn’t my car making it.
It was a man with a leaf blower.
:eek:
I parked for a while at a stop sign about 2 blocks away. I put my window down and awaited to hear the crisp sound of a rifle or pistol being fired in the late spring morning air.
Nothing except the droan of the leaf blower. 'Tis a shame.
In my humble little opinion, leaf blowers should be illegal to run at any hour of the day or night. What’s the problem with getting a rake or something? Does abso-fuckin-lutely everything have to be done with an ear-destroying power tool?
A couple of years back, on New Year’s morning at about 7 am, our next-door neighbor got on the roof and proceeded to run his leaf blower for like, two hours. :mad::mad:
Probably drunk.
ETA: Before any 'Stallis guys get on my case, IME whenever I’ve been in West Allis at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’ve been drunk. Check the George Webbs, it’s true!
It’s almost impossible (read: impossible) for me to clean out my front garden with a rake. Too many closely spaced shrubs, and it’s made out of marble chips which are very unfriendly to rakes; at best it’s pretty much entirely uneffective, at worst all the rocks end up on my lawn.
I am, however, aware of how annoying the damn things are, so I get as much out with the rake/by hand as possible before I fire up the leaf blower, which I try not to use for more than 10 or 15 minutes.
I can understand using the blower to get leaves out of tight spots or garden beds but we once had a neighbor who raked then used his blower on an entire 1/2 acre lawn to get all the leaves the rake missed. Fercryingout loud it’s the OUTDOORS, there are going to be some leaves. Yeah, then the leaves blew in from the rest of the outdoors.
If I had to use a blower I would try to use it when someone else is mowing or blowing.
I love to fire up my gas engine weedeater and do the backyard when my shitstain neighbor is having a pool party. I did it at least 3 times last summer.
Out here in CA, there have been various movements to make leaf blowers illegal, many of which were defeated by claims that such a law would be racist. :rolleyes::rolleyes::dubious:
fachverwirrt- you could just leave the leaves there, you know.
I think it’s fairly well known that five in the morning is the best time for doing irrational things that are loud and will wake up the neighbors.
Our house is too distant from any neighbor’s yard to be disturbed by the sound of their leafblowers, but a few days ago I was woken up at exactly 5:03 AM by the sound of one of our neighbor’s hunting hounds baying loudly right outside my window. It was snuffling around in the grass, I suppose looking for rabbits, many of whom have lately come to regard our lawn as something of a sanctuary. In any case, it was making an unholy racket and had to be dealt with.
In my groggy, sleep-deprived state I briefly entertained the satisfying notion of grabbing a rifle and a shovel and spending what remained of the grey hours of the morning digging a shallow grave, but in the end I contented myself with giving the little bastard some exercise. I was still half asleep as I pulled on my shoes, but the thrill of the chase is a powerful stimulant, and when I broke into a run it was all I could do to stifle an exuberant “woop.” The hound, apparently riveted by the smell of a rabbit, didn’t notice me until I had closed the distance to about five yards. At that point he looked up and, seeing the fires of judgment in my eyes, decided to do his best impression of something running very fast away from something very angry.
If I may say so, it was a rather unequal race. However hard he moved those short little legs, he couldn’t outrun me: he managed no greater lead than about eight feet, and at any moment I could have put on speed and given him a well-deserved kick in the rear. However, I hold that it is impolite to kick a neighbor’s dog, even if it has woken you at 5 in the morning, and at any rate the effulgent beauty and general kissing with golden face the meadows green-ness of the morning had banished my irritability and I felt predisposed to leniency. Nonetheless it would have been imprudent to let him off easily, and I chased the dog in my pajamas (I was in my pajamas, not the dog) for about a quarter of a mile before he ducked into some thick foliage and escaped.
Then I went back inside and back to sleep because fuck, it was five o’fucking clock in the fucking morning and I swear if that fucking dog comes back baying after rabbits I will personally grab the nearest fuzzy bunny and shove it down his throat.
For two straight months, including weekends and holidays, a guy with a leaf blower would pass by our house between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning, every morning.
Sent by the city.
It took us dozens of calls and threatening letters to get them to stop. We got as high as a deputy mayor. At one point my wife actually made a city official cry. To this day, the sound of a leaf blower puts me in fight-or-flight mode, even at 3 PM.
So don’t talk to me about leaf blowers. I loathe them with the passion of a thousand very loud suns.
