Read 'Til You Drop

Glad to hear this worked out for you. Let's hope the new tenant isn't a drummer. :)

Only kinda related, but thought you might appreciate the story anyways. I was staying with a girlfriend for about a week in Missouri. Her apartment had molecule-thin walls, and her next-door neighbor apparently was preparing for some sort of choir show that entire week. At first, it was kind of amusing to hear his off-renditions of some Bruce Springsteen songs and America the Beautiful, among others. But it grew really tiresome fast, and on about the third day, I went and hammered on his door. I was prepared to rip the guy a new one, but when he opened the door, I'd have liked to have died from holding back laughter. Here was this small man dressed in an eye-bleeding American flag plastic-looking suit, complete with sparkly red, white, blue, and pink (yes, pink) bangles and sequin-esque things hanging everywhere. I just mumbled, "Keep it down," went back into the girlfriend's apartment, buried my head in a pillow and laughed for nearly ten minutes. I still get little hysterical hiccupy laughs when I try to tell people how ridiculous the guy looked.

Best of luck. We're in a detached house but our newest next door neighbor has the highest ratio of honking big trucks and SUVs to house frontage of anyone on the street. So guess where he parks? In front of us, that's where!

I know exactly what you mean! We currently live in condo's that have some sort of sound dampening between the units, but that doesn't always help. Before being sold to a very quiet man, we had some rental tenants next-door who ended being arrested for selling heroin out of the house! The house was trashed when they finally got the eviction to clear and the owner could get into the unit. After speaking to the contractor who did the remodel I found out all sorts of things that I rather have not known about, like the used needles buried in the carpet of the spare room! Those neighbors had a tendency to turn up the bass and rattle our china until I reminded them to turn it down.

Yuck! As a french horn player, I'll vouch that I HATE people who do loud noises at night, so I can't understand why on earth he would have thought 12:30 was a good time to play. The horn is not a very quiet instrument...

When my husband and I lived in a tiny little apartment when we were in school, there were two guys in the apartment above us. They were constantly on video games and blasting their stereo at 3am. Every night. At first we let it go, because stuff like that is expected in a college town. Especially a building that is mostly college kids. Finally I'd had enough and called the cops. They kept up the act, so I kept calling the cops until after 5 nights of the cops having to talk to the guys, they finally cut it out. They were loud the rest of the day, but between the hours of 12am and 8am we could get at least some sleep.

I can't express how happy I am to be out of that building and in a new town.

I hope you don't mind me commenting, as I haven't commented here before, but it appears that that the German versin of The Glasswright's Apprentice has finally been released!

http://www.amazon.de/Die-Gilden-von-Morenia-1/dp/344224384X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200008348&sr=8-1

There's only one review so far, but I believe it just came out a few days ago. My German is very rusty, but one thing that stuck out was the reviewer saying that the cover was misleading and looked more like a romance cover, so it was a surprise when Rani was a 13 year old and the story was more fantasy/adventure. I agree with this - the covers were one of my favorite things about the English version, and they set the tone for the setting/style of the book, but the German cover looks like it's meant to be a dark romance...

The reviewer also said (I believe) that the caste system was interesting in that you didn't know who was "good" and who was "bad" simply based on where they stood in the system.

I'm going to order a copy (because I'm really, really interested in seeing how Hal's sing-song language played out in German) as soon as I find something else so as to justify the expensive shipping from Germany...

Have you heard any news about them publishing the other books in Germany? I suppose it might depend on how well the first one sells, but they did label it "1" so maybe they are at least planning on doing so.

Hope you didn't mind the random comment! :)

~Anna