Re: OT - foam ear plugs and the quality of life

One of my favorite activities is mowing my property, and it is made
even more enjoyable by cheap foam earplugs and a cold Heineken or Sam
Adams in the cup holder of my tractor. The drugstore has them in bulk
packs and they work pretty good, I love em.



Kid Kool wrote:
Highly recommended as a daily tool. We're surrounded most of the time
by a dull roar, if not outright noise. If I take the train downtown
there's the roar of the train and the whine as the doors open and
close. You ignore it, as it's background noise, but it's really loud
and debilitating. When I go for my morning coffee, it's on the banks of
the Fraser River, it's gorgeous, and there's a radio in the cafe
playing Sweeet Home Alabama [in A#], and it's loud enough for
customers on the patio to enjoy it [sic]. The sound of traffic, which
we tend to ignore , is _really_ loud. In an office you'll be amazed at
how loud the AC is. As I type, and I'm in a really quiet area, there's
a truck somewhere within a block doing something that involves going
forward and then backing up again, so that sqealing reverse alarm is
going off twice a minute. If you fly, those engines really pump out
noise, even at crusing levels. And the idiots endlessly jabbering into
cell phones everywhere....

But the gods, in their infinite wisdom, gave us foam ear plugs, which
are cheap and cut out about 25 db. You can still hear enough to note
car horns and alarms, but the plugs just cut things down to where it's
no longer assaultive. Normally the train downtown, 1/2 hr each way, is
exhausting, but today it was a piece of cake thanks to the ear plugs -
I didn't have my eardrums and mind constantly assaulted during the
ride, and downtown the roar of trucks and horns was very background.

I have some noise reduction headphones, Sennheisers, and they're good,
not to mention expensive, but nowhere near as efficacious as plugs.
Plus the phones are fiddly and you're just begging to forget them
somewhere or get ripped off.

These ear plugs a real contribution to the quality of life. You don't
notice how freaking loud things are until you cut the noise down. I
wear them at night, too - it's quiet here but every now and then a
truck or motorcycle takes out street by mistake, not to mention the
train that is legally obliged to give 5 warning blasts as it approaches
the level crossing, or the tugboats that let out ferocious moans for
whatever reason at various times - and this is nowhere near as noisy as
downtown at night - and I sleep right through it. There's been a very
noticeable difference in the quality of sleep - you might not
necessarily wake up from a truck or whatever, but you'll come up from
that deep REM and take time toget back.

Really recommended - for a buck you can improve the quality of your
existnce immeasurably. Plus if you go to a club and some doofoid starts
playing hip lines over changes, or, even worse, if someone starts
lecturing about hip lines over changes, you don't have to pull out your
Glock and off the mutha. The savings in ammo will more than pay for
the earplugs.

.

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