Carne mechada

"Hammered meat." That's what I feel like right now. I've been coughing non-stop for 48 hours. It's a dry cough that sounds horrible, and each one feels like I'm doing a stomach crunch. I am so sore. If I conservatively count 6 coughs a minute (that's a cough every 10 seconds), in the past 48 hours I've coughed 17,280 times. At this rate, I'm going to have six-pack abs by Sunday.


At least I might be able to get some sleep tonight. I've had this buzzing in the upstairs bedroom wall for months. A pest service came out to poke holes in the wall thinking the culprits might be bees or wasps. They didn't find anything, and I was left with a bunch of holes I still haven't patched. The buzzing is quite annoying - it's random, and not predictable - I liken it to water torture stories I've read about.


My workaround for this situation was to sleep downstairs in my guest bedroom. That worked fine until this week when my brother came to stay with me for a while. So back to the upstairs bedroom I went. I think I got about 3 hours of sleep the first night. The second night I started banging harder on the walls, thinking if there were insects in the walls, they would be annoyed by my pounding. All my pounding did nothing for the buzzing and just made my hand sore. Next, I opened the window to try banging from the outside. While beating on my outside siding, I happened to brush against a telephone line running from the telephone pole in front to an anchor point near where I suspected the buzzing to be.


Turns out the telephone line was vibrating. When I grabbed the line, I dampened the vibrations and the buzzing went away. Let go and the buzzing returned. And the wall anchor made things worse because it turned my wall into an amplifier - like when you were a kid and used 2 cups and string to simulate a telephone. Anyway, I called AT&T and had them remove the old line today. The buzzing is gone. Silence has been restored. And there was much rejoicing.