Week 9, Zanna: Listen to Sounds

The Exercise:  Several times a day, stop and just listen.  Open your hearing 360 degrees, as if your ears were giant radar dishes.  Listen to the obvious sounds, and the subtle sounds – in your body, in the room, in the building, and outside.  Listen as if you had just landed from a foreign planet and didn’t know what was making these sounds. See if you can hear all sounds as music being played just for you.

This week was all about started out unseasonably warm.  Apparently, the nature didn't get the memo that spring isn't supposed to start until late March.  The temperatures were almost warm enough to turn on the air conditioning... but the South Dakotan in me finds it extremely difficult to do that the last week of February, first week of March.  It's just wrong.  So we had the windows open.  Which was fine, except for this constant peeping sound that I kept hearing.  Click the link and close your eyes for the full effect.  I try to listen to it as the music of nature, but honestly it's mostly just annoying.  At first I thought it was a bird in distress.

But no.  It's called a Spring Peeper and it's a cute little amphibian. Other froggy sounds (and we have a lot, with three ponds in the backyard and a backyard that is a National Wildlife Federation certified Backyard Habitat) are soothing, but this one-note frog is not a welcome sound.



Kitteh-pile.  From left to right: Noh-Face (the snorer), (Barfing) Banshee, Cinco (the Brave, but not very bright).

Another sound I heard this week is one that lures me into instant sleepiness.  We have five cats (because we don't want six) and one of them, Noh-Face,  has a snoring problem.  The cat in the video below is not my cat, but sounds just like him.  Close your eyes and try NOT to start drifting to sleep as you listen.  I can't do it.

Recently, I ordered a new pair of shoes from Alegria shoes, very much like these: 

I love how comfortable they are... but in this week of listening to sounds, I became painfully aware of how much they "fart".  Take a listen to what I mean:

 

But these are just a few of the noises I became more aware of this week.  The white noise machine pumping static sound into the air at work.  The early morning thunderstorms that made it close to impossible to get out of bed.  The faint sounds of sirens in the distance and jet planes overhead.  We live in a very noisy world.  It's amazing how much of it we're able to tune out.