Dragon Mother Cometh

There is a special place in my heart for the joys of construction works being carried out in the neighboring apartment (“til October!” the officious-sounding laminated notice pasted in the lift lobby promises – did anyone notice the irony is just sick, I was so careful with dust protection and noise, moving the baby out for the barely-one-hour it took to install window blinds and Rockstar’s shelves. As I type the drilling and hammering has been going two days, a.k.a. Some Time After Our Nanny Is No Longer With Us And For Way Too Long).

So anyway when this happens, these are some of the people (and animals) you will hate:

1) The nameless people who own the apartment next door and are probably blissfully putting up at the Shangri-La while their neighbors live with the prolonged construction noise and dust in the lobby.

2) The designer who inconsiderately came up with a layout that requires drilling and hammering. (What is wrong with using those stick-on hooks from Japan Home Center, I would like to know?)

And- and – is the air in the apartment hazy? 

Which brings me to –

3) The building management person who initially simply replies “But it’s their right to do this what.” There better not be a smug Serves You Right For Not Being At Work in there. And I suppose your baby reminding you a gadzillion times a day that you are a terrible, terrible person for not being able to Make It Stop Make It Stop is more fun than sitting at a reception desk 9-5?

(Btw when I first got here, in a different development, we were in a 1,400 sq foot rental, spacious I guess by local HK standards, and I got asked “Are you even 30 to get to live in a place like this?”)

“Are you telling me that because it is ‘within their right’ to drill and hammer (which btw I never complained about in the past) you expect me to let the air in my apartment get so dusty my baby gets sick? (Right on cue baby Rockstar Ngehs from a bedroom) Look at the haze in this place!”

“I could ask them to drill with the doors and windows closed?”

Wow. We drilled with our doors and windows closed, vacuuming everything along the way. You have to ask for that?

About 30 minutes later, the haze in our apartment starts to clear. The day however, is now punctuated by very loud door slams. Yeah like I’m scared. You people have been drilling what I’m fairly sure is the exact wall between that apartment and ours which, as Murphy’s Law would have it, is also where the baby sleeps in our home.

And then while we’re trying to calm the poor, fussing baby who has been woken from her nap for the umpteenth time and Rockstar comes home expecting to be fed and to some extent entertained, we have –

4) “You let that one go by?? <bugged out eyes> It was right there! What’s the matter with you???”

Yes, a dog who is enthusiastically laying tennis balls for you to kick around the apartment especially when you are freaking scurrying around. And giving you the most obnoxious eye-balling when you miss one.  A measure of just how much an animal is loved in a household is by her sense of entitlement to her “fair share” of attention no matter how I-have-to-punch-something harassed you get.

Oh yeah. The Dragon Mother. It’s in all of us to breathe flames when someone’s upsetting our baby. Still managed to hold it together til the drilling starts for a third day after they assured me they would be done in two. And the person who told me they’d be done yesterday? Now on her day off.

RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

Before she got really upset at not being able to take a proper nap