Today Was a Gas

Today just wasn't ideal... I arrived at home around 4:30AM, but the only parking spots available in the neighborhood were on a stretch of road that is a no parking Thursdays 8AM-Noon area. The streets must be cleaned, and for some reason, this particular roadway needs a four hour window, rather than the neighborhood standard two hours. Not wanting to oversleep and earn myself a $65 ticket, I decided to stay up, and finally moved my car to another parking spot at 7:30. The main reason why parking is so tight is that Consolidated Edison, our local utilities conglomerate, is replacing gas mains in the neighborhood. My street is dug up, with steel plates on the spots where the gas main breaks out into the lines for the individual houses. As luck would have it, ConEd is replacing mains all over the county, so the sidewalk outside my principle workplace is also dug up, and has sections of pipe stacked up against our perimeter fence. I finally crawled into bed around 8AM... and then the jackhammering began. Today was the day on which ConEd would replace the gas line leading into my house. Between the noise and vibrations of the pneumatic drill, and the clanging of the workers coupling the new gas pipe to the house, I didn't get much sleep. I'm not a deep sleeper to begin with, and can usually ignore background noise, but this was too close, and too physical- I felt the construction as much as I heard it. After a few hours of this, a ConEd representative had to enter my apartment to restart my stove/range after the gas had been cut off for so long. I imagine I looked a mess, all groggy and disheveled, but these workers regularly enter people's homes so they must see it all. When it was all over, I was able to catch a couple of hours of sleep before having to wake for work. I really didn't feel so hot when the alarm sounded. It's been a bad week for sleep for me... thankfully, the cat won't be able to see that my peepers are a bit bloodshot.