Why! 4am?
 

Some fraternities are located on campus grounds, at Texas, they're not. We're located close to campus, in the area known as "west campus" where it's 90% students. Recently Austin changed the zoning laws and such so developers could go on a rampage destroying tons of old apartments to build new, huge ones. By law they can't start working until 7AM, but it's 4AM and I can hear the trucks already lining the streets, leaving their engines running.

I'm up now still writing a paper, but I couldn't tell you how many mornings I've been woken up by trucks getting ready to unload materials early in the morning. Also having to pay for a new tire every time I run over a nail that they left in the road.

My focus is, what annoyances do you find around your house? There are a lot of hippies here, they are annoying.

3 comments:

1) Arriving at 4am for 7am work seems a bit odd. That being said, you don't shut off a diesel engine, you let it idle...unless you're at a cemetery.

2) I don't think "woken" is a word. But I use it, so it must be a Texas thing.

3) Hippies are bad for the enviroment. If you don't like them you should transfer to A&M, unless you're studying something like journalism.

About 26 trains run through College Station each day (for those of you who've never been fortunate enough to visit College Station, a train track cuts right through the middle of A&M's campus). I used to wake up at 2 in the morning as a train was nearing a street crossing. Fortunately I graduated several years ago so I don't have to deal with it anymore.

Our house was off campus, but just off campus (i.e. across the street 2 ways out of 3 was on). It was also located near a hill that apparently the ROTC found good for running up and down as part of their exercise. That would have been fine if they wouldn't have been CHANTING at the same time and doing it AT 5 IN THE MORNING.

Oh, and I think woken is a word.

I thought woken was right, too, but can't find it in the dictionary.

"I was awakened..." ?????????????????

This happened when I lived at U of L, the ROTC guys would run & chant at 5AM past the dorms.

I feel your pain.

Hippies still exist?:confused:

Come to Austin.

Dang. I guess I will, next time we go home (Brenham).

I remember when we'd boat down the river back in the day and you'd see Hippie Hollow over on the side with naked hippies on the banks.

Fotunately I got use to the train noise, what I didn't like is that the train itself would often make me late to class. BTW, I use "woken" as well.

They're doing it to annoy you. :p

There was one summer where I stayed at school, living in the dorms. Typically, each dorm will have 2 or 3 floors open, and repairs are done in the rest of the building. They weren't supposed to start until 8am, but they always started by 6am or so. I was living on the top floor of the building, and one morning I was awakened at 6:30 by footsteps overhead... they were fixing the roof. (6:30 is not as bad as 4, but still...)

When it snowed, snow plows would be deployed around campus, and snow removal would start as soon as the snow stopped - day or night. So you'd be woken up by the intermittent beep beep beep of a snow plow in reverse. On the one hand, I was glad the snow was removed and the paths were (reasonably) safe by the time I had to go to class; on the other hand, I wanted to sleep at night!

No on the first (I think)

Yes on the second (for sure)

"I wanna be an Airborne Ranger...
I wanna live a life of Danger..."

(Maybe the chants have changed since my time...)

PT is always run at o'dark-thirty!
Don't you remember the military slogan
"We get more done before 9 am than most people get done in a day"?

Per Fowler's Modern English Usage (2nd Ed. 1965), any of the following would/could be correct for passive voice, past tense:

"I was awakened by the noise."

"The noise wakened me." (rare, though, and therefore not preferred.)

"I was wakened by it."

"I was woke by it." (not preferred)

"I was woken by it."

My Random House Unabridged does have "woken" in it.

When would you use "awoken"

Who cares! Now all I hear is the banging of the workers renovating the KA house next door. I can't wait to see it when it's finished, but I sure hate the work that's involved. Hey macallan, didn't it take you guys just a couple of months to finish yalls apartments?

Another thing that annoys me: Next to our house is this shanty looking crack house (you can go from beautiful homes, to crap in West Campus) and there is an ex-con crack head living there. For work now, he installs small motors onto bicycles and they are loud and high pitched. That's not even the clincher, When I pass by his place on the way to the bus stop, I can see one of our coolers sitting next to his door! The jackass stole one of our coolers! I think our house is to far west, in west campus.

"He was awoken by a knock on the door," perhaps.

I should have completely quoted the first part of the entry before: Awake has past awoke, rarely awaked, and p.p. awaked sometimes awoken and rarely awoke; wake has past woke, rarely (and that usually in transitive sense) waked, and p.p. waked, rarely woke or woken; awaken and waken have -ed.

So I should have noted that "I was woken by it" is also rare, but acceptable. I should have also noted that Fowler's tends to reflect British rather than American usage.

I grew up near a railroad track and I love the sound of a train at night.

On the other hand, work trucks would have me going insane.

When something woken you up from a dead sleep in the middle of great dream!

Hell, that time of the morning cob webs in the head!:D

Local lingo is apparent at times is it not?:)

No.

hippie hollow is still there, but it's on a lake, not a river.

Oh, man...I understand. My old apartment was on a busy street so whenever they made repairs on it, they did it--you guessed it--at night. Since my bedroom happened to be on the front of the building just a couple yards from the street, and it had almost an entire wall of (uninsulated, turn-of-the-century style) windows, I was treated to a symphony of truck engine noises, banging, and jackhammering alllllll night long. They only worked on the street about three times while I lived there, but once they were apparently doing something pretty complicated because it took them several weeks to finish the job. I'm glad I don't live there anymore!

This reminds me of my friend's alma mater in Oregon. There is a dorm across the train tracks from the rest of the campus. In the last couple years they've designated it the freshman dorm. It's bad enough that they've isolated freshmen from the rest of the campus, but to have train tracks separating them is downright stupid. There is a skybridge across, but many students just cross the tracks. It's very unsafe!

*lake

Try going to Barton Springs. There's this old man wearing a tiny little speedo always doing yoga in the same exact spot. Also there's bound to be a few topless ladies (not the good kind) with hairy pits and at least one person playing the tambourine.

Ugh, I don't ever WANT to see any more naked hippies, ever. They looked like the people you just described.

I got my SCUBA certifications diving at Windy Point and Hippie Hollow. As odd as the view is above water in the latter location- you would be amazed what can be found on the lake bottom.

This great city still has a bit of a hippie infestation- but thankfully the value of that movement is reflected in the lack of future generations' adoption of its principles.

LMAO. on my campus, there were these 2 women who sold hippie jewelry and scarves and other random junk on a street corner. they set up a table in front of their myster machine/pedophiler looking van and wore these copper looking rings.

maybe their metro/city hippies?

My first two years of college were at a federal service academy that sent graduates to all branches of the military, so I got to hear just about every cadence in use in every service those two years (and was rather like being in a fraternity that hazes HARD and has a nine-month pledge period) and I last heard that cadence as

"wanna live a life of sex, guns and danger
wanna make my living as an Airborne Ranger"

Though, we may have miss-chanted that one based off of the "When I get to Heaven" cadence...

My dorm last year used to be next to the Amtrak station, so every time a train came in the conductor would lay on the horn for a good 10 minutes. Also, the shape of the building is kind of concave, so the sound would echo off the building right into your window, regardless of what direction you faced. Sometimes it would be so loud the room would shake and stuff would fall over - pretty amazing for a massive 30+ story building..

Trains run a mere 30 feet from my dorm window. It doesn't bother me anymore.

However, my first college was a stone's throw from the Columbus Airport...first night of college, I got landing lights right in my windows (and eyes). Try sleeping through that!

Did you go to Ohio Dominican? Just curious...

I used to get severely annoyed by all the fraternity boys living around us. My sorority house was next door to Farmhouse and Sig Ep with Pike and ATO behind us. Some of the boys like to flash those stupid laser pointer things into our bedroom at night, which made it hard to go to sleep. The Pikes were forever outside breaking shit or hammering stuff together in the middle of the night and I still to this day have no idea why. And of course there was the general loudness of screaming, drunk boys smashing beer cans and bottles while blaring loud music out their windows, at most times of the day.

Ahh, how I miss college life. ;)

I'm not that sensitive to loud noises, unless it's gun shots. I think this may be a white thing. :)

You are correct! I miss Columbus a lot, and am sort of hoping to head back there for grad school.

While I think I live in a relatively quiet neighborhood, my neighbor aparently doesn't. She's forever calling the cops on us for no apparent reason. One time the cops came to my house at about 3 AM. We were all VERY asleep, but she seemed to think that we were hammering on her outside walls (??!). Our houses are made of wood and naturally they have nails holding the boards on. There were hammer dents from where the nails were hammered in origninally. She made us all walk in the wet grass as she and the cop examined her walls. She thought my roomate and I were just out hammering on her house at 3 AM! The cops even thought she was crazy.

The cops have been called on me three times this semester for excessive noise (by her probably) yet we have yet to receive a noise violation. She needs to turn down her hearing aids or something because this is annoying.

Awesome. I went to Capital, which is relatively close to Dominican. I can see where you would get bothered by the airplanes a lot there.

I suppose there are two good things that come from all this construction around me, when they finish, around where I live, things will look nicer, and the roach coach that comes 10 times a day and plays that stupid horn. I sound angry at them, but the food is awesome, and parks right infront of our house. I guess some good can come from the bad.

This year seems to be the year of renovations in Morgantown. I've spent practically every day this semester being woken up at 7 AM (the earliest was 6:30 and I honestly debated throwing stuff at the workers) by jackhammering and whatever else they do during construction. The best part is though that they only seemed to do the loud stuff from 7-10 in the morning, then fool around the rest of the day (me and my roommates have been whistled at countless times walking to class, it's horrible). I've slept at friends places some nights just so I could get a decent night's sleep, and then finally about a month ago I bought earplugs, which work to keep out the majority of the noise. This is the first year I'll actually be grateful for snow so it'll stop the construction!

I sleep through almost everything.

WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING?!?!
Telling a longhorn to transfer to A&M, psh, that's asking for a beating, haha. More so, telling someone to choose to live in College Station makes me question your sanity. :D I'd much rather deal with loud construction at 2 AM every day for the rest of my life.

However I too live in west campus and share the woes of the early morning construction noises and nails (TWO completely blown tires in a week and a half). But I have something else to add:
-The workers must not know what a water main looks like. My water has randomly died throughout the day for the past 3 months and every time I get in my car later to go somewhere and see water gushing into the streets.