Banging, cont.

So I thought the story was outstanding, but tonight it got even better.

I was on my way home from work and called to see how things were going in our sweet corporate apartment. "Well, I just said goodbye to a policeman". Hmmm. Our neighbors now called the police. Surely the police would look at the situation and realize these guys were hypersensitive, right? Nope. He watched Lucy practicing her new two footed hop and Porter running across the room and confirmed that we could indeed receive a citation for the local noise ordinance for that. Huh? This is the state that gave us Kelli Clarkson and my five year old running or my two year old learning to jump with two feet is citable? Good grief. The oppression of electric fence in Joburg suddenly feels less onerous.

So there are only a few ways to respond to this sort of thing:
1) Retaliate. Light a bag full of human feces on fire on their doorstop and run for it.
2) Avoid. Move the kids to the other apartment and pray the second floor neighbor is less extreme on that side of the building.
3) Apologize.

Guess whose ideas these belonged to. Katie won with #3 by a hair over my favored approaches. As it turns out the people below us are very nice. We had a long talk. I thought for sure he'd be some ornery, feeble old fart. Actually, they're from Brazil, had really crappy neighbors right before us and have been deathly ill. He also works at 2 am and goes to bed at 7 pm. We apologized, as did they. We'll try harder. They'll lay off the 911 for seven days so we can get out of their hair.

As always, Katie was right. I've got to believe that even cops in Texas would have appreciated the flaming poo bag though.