I live out in the country. I'm used to crickets. I've also gotten used to cicidas, since living out on the lake in recent years. It's just nightly background noise to me.
I'd be used to them, too, except for three problems:
1. These aren't just crickets. They are city crickets. They are Camel Crickets. BIG HONKIN' CRICKETS, and each and every one of them has a 70 + decibel chirp. For the uninformed, that is a loudness level just below the noise of a washing machine, and well above the loudness of a normal conversation. Five of them together can cause hearing loss over a prolonged time. Millions of them are more than sufficient to drive me completely batty.
2. There are millions of them, and every last one of them wants to get his noisy self indoors (in other words, inside my HOUSE) every time it rains. It rains a LOT, out here.
3. There is a large holly bush below my bedroom window, right next to my bed. Several thousand crickets live in or near it. They are louder than the traffic on the interstate (freeway), which is VERY close to my house. At night, it gets REALLY loud. Painfully loud. Drive-you-up-the-walls-in-agony LOUD.
The only thing that keeps me from going totally bonkers? The walls of my house are almost perfect, acoustically, which means that any sound INSIDE my room STAYS inside my room, and any sound outside it stays outside it, provided that the windows are all closed.
However, my family has a bad habit of opening windows.
