On Sundays, I get up early to hear the word. On Saturdays, I get up early to hear the leaf blower.
Traffic noise or that of a vacuum cleaner typically runs around 70 decibels. A loud alarm clock is about 80 decibels. A leaf blower, by way of comparison, punishes those nearby with about 115 decibels, midway between the noise of a car horn (110 decibels) and a jetliner taking off (120 decibels). I do not usually sleep very late, but I do not get up as early as Hortulanus americanus. The Leaf-Blower Man and his colleagues work from dawn to dusk, their almost unvaried white pickup trucks prowling and parking, sometimes four or five to a block on a busy day where I live, constricting the typically wide residential avenues of my town to practically European proportions — the nice people around here can hardly get their Audis past one another. If you do not think very hard about the legal situation (more than a fifth of the landscaping work force is composed of illegal immigrants, and there is some reason to believe that some of these outfits are less than scrupulous about payroll taxes and the like), there is much to admire about the entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic on display.
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