Two jeers and a cheer* today: my neighbors suck. Why were those guys up at three in the morning on a Thursday in a residential neighborhood? Especially when our co-tenant has spoken to them before about being loud late at night?

When I got home at 10 last night, four tiki torches were burning over a beer-pong table propped up by our garbage cans (which I wanted to get into, by the way, but whatever), and a car was running with the door open and the stereo on, but no one was around. I hadn't seen any person in the area by 11 p.m., so I put out the torches, turned the stereo off, and went to bed. At 2 a.m., the partygoers came back, presumably from the bar across the yard. They were up and at it until 3 at least. I didn't say anything then, partly because I was already in bed and also because my restlessness could have just been because I had had coffee at 9 p.m. so I didn't want to blame them but mostly because, duh, I don't like being the adult and making the scene, so I just made plans to talk to them today or this weekend. However, the little old lady in the third apartment told me this morning that she had called the police about the noise, and I can't blame her a bit.

Other jeer: what the hell is with private Web sites that try to take the place of public ones? DMV.org/Vermont, for example, and the lack of the link is intentional. As far as I can tell it's a company — probably just some guy running a dozen such Web sites — trying to make money by selling ad space to insurance companies. If you look around there for any useful information, they just make you click a few precious links before sending you to the real state Web site. Yeah, it's a minor annoyance, but still.

But a CHEER to important people getting sick. Um, that came out wrong, especially since the hospital administrator in question is a nice guy and all that. I certainly have nothing against him personally. But when his secretary called me an hour or so ago I was guiltily relieved, just because it meant I didn't have to do an interview I'm only half-prepared for. It would have been even worse because of the lack of sleep and other annoyances. So I get to put it off until Tuesday. Which is kinda funny, though, because it was already rescheduled once, because I had forgot I had something else going on.

That promised post about my bad weekend is coming up, and I think I even have an interesting way to tell the story. Just putting it off again.

* That phrasing of "cheers and jeers" for a list of stuff you simply like or don't like sounds pretty dumb, I think. But I had a hard time thinking of a better word for the positive side, and that kind of locked me into the rhyming negative side. Oh well.