The house next door

I think cetrotide is making me just as grouchy and ranty as lupron ever did.  Because here follows a rant.

My street of houses started off as little single-storey 50's ranch houses.  Since then, some of them have grown to two storeys, some have added on big side wings and some have stayed little.  Except for the house next door to mine.  Which not only had a big side wing added, but a three storey extension, just to be different.  But the addition wasn't designed terribly well - I mean, it looks very pretty from the outside but when I went for a look around I could tell that three of the rooms were pretty much unusable for anybody normal.  It was for sale when I bought my house, back when the market was hot.  It languished on the market for a year that I know of, and I don't know how long it was on the market before that.  And this was when people were falling over themselves to snap up houses as fast as possible.  All due to bad design.  

Eventually, the house sold, for much less than its exorbitant asking price.  But then we found out that the couple that bought it run a business letting out vacation homes.  They had at the time I think 5 vacation houses around the city, and this was going to be their biggest one.  So they spent a fortune putting in a swimming pool and adding fancy landscaping and furnishing the place.  My friends and neighbors and I would get together and exclaim in amazement about how anybody would want to come and vacation on a perfectly ordinary street, or pay the price this couple were asking for the house.  OK, so we're in Florida, but there's nothing nearby that would draw you in - it's not like it's on the beach or near a theme park or anything.  Just an ordinary street.

And mostly, our predictions have come true.  The house is empty 90% of the time which is lovely and quiet for me.  But surprisingly, some people obviously do pay the crazy prices to live in this house for a weekend, or a week, or two.  And when they do, like this week, it drives me nucking futs.  I mean, it's not that the people who rent the house are crazy loud.  They are just doing normal vacation things, like letting their kids play in the pool at all hours of the day.  Or sitting out on the patio grilling and talking and having fun.  The house is big enough that it attracts a group of people, so it's usually more than just one family unit at a time and they have lots of catching up to do.  The trouble being that if it was their own home a) they wouldn't be out there all the effing time, and b) they would modulate how noisy they are because they'd care about disturbing the neighbors.  I guess nobody cares about disturbing the neighbors when they're on vacation because they won't have to see them again.  But fer fuck's sake, it cuts right through me to have somebody else's kids screaming and cannonballing in the pool at 7am while I'm trying to face another day and another IVF cycle.