Weekend Interrupted

I've just had one one of those weekends which descended into haziness, with time slipping away and little achieved.  My attempts to recover from the work-related fiasco of Friday were rudely interrupted on Saturday morning when, after only a few hours sleep (I'd been catching up with trash TV until the early hours) I was rudely awakened by one my neighbours banging out the back just after eight o'clock.  When I say 'banging', that's not a euphemism.  They were hammering away at something - and it just went on and on.  Trying to get back to sleep during this was impossible, so I  spent several hours listening to the radio, before I got back to sleep, only awakening in the afternoon.  Obviously, this left me feeling completely disorientated and my plans for the day utterly disrupted.  But never mind, I thought, I've still got Sunday morning to catch up on my sleep.  But yes, you've guessed it, they started again, this time observing the decorum of the Lord's day by waiting until eight thirty to start hammering. Again, it went on for hours. This time I resorted to ear plugs.  My day still ended up severely disrupted.

I'm left wondering what is wrong with some people - don't they understand the concept of the weekend?  You don't have to get up at the crack of dawn to carry out noisy outdoor projects, especially in Summer - you've got all day, for two days, to do it.  Personally, I never start anything that's going to involve lots of noise before ten o'clock on weekends.  I figure that, like me, for most people the weekend is the only chance they have to break out of tiresome work routines and instead relax and stay in bed longer.  Clearly, though, not everyone is as considerate as me in this respect.  I remember that some years ago there was someone in the houses across the back from mine who used to start up all sorts of power tools at nine o'clock every Saturday morning.  Eventually he annoyed me so much that I shouted in his general direction from my bathroom window, calling him an 'evil bastard'.  It might just have been coincidence, but that was the last Saturday he played with his power tools at such an early hour.  It's surprising how badly a weekend disrupted in this way can put you out: it isn't just the lack of sleep and general disruption of sleeping patterns, but also the way it interferes with one's plans.  I ended up spending a large part of my waking hours on the sofa, feeling disorientated, rather than actually getting on with things, for instance.  The end result was that I got up this morning with a sense of dissatisfaction, as if I hadn't actually had a weekend, which persisted all day.  Hopefully, next weekend will be quieter.