Noisy neighborhood.

What's that loud clashing noise I hear all over the block?

It turns out they repainted the fire hydrants, again. The town seems to do this every now and then, and never the same color twice. This irritating red and orange hydrant was a stylish yellow and blue last week. Now it's so loud even the dogs won't go near it. Sensitive ears, you know.

I was puzzling out what this means. The town's done strange things on the street before, like leave street markings for alien ship landings. One thing they did just this week was notify us that the water might shut off one morning between nine and noon, but it never happened, unless it was just for a moment when we weren't in the shower or flushing the can. This was said to be part of a water flow improvement project, and I wondered if the Crayola attack on the hydrants was connected.

According to the site Today I Found Out, upon which one may find out things, fire hydrants may be color-coded according to their water pressure. "Due to the numerous different supply systems throughout the United States, there can be a wide range of available supply, from 500 GPM [gallons per minute] or less to over 2500 GPM." It's very helpful for firefighters to know at a glance what the water pressure is going to be when they hook up to the water supply. So that could be the answer, right?

Maybe not; the same article notes according to National Fire Protection Agency standards, while the caps indicate the water pressure (orange would be 500 to 999 GPM) the body of the thing should be "chrome yellow." A red cap would mean under 500 GPM. Using a red body muddles the code for the cap, if that's even what's being signaled here.

What the heck, town? Get your act together!

If I find out that this was some idiot councilman's idea of "aesthetics" to help keep our town "weird," I will write a strongly worded letter to the editor. This was a nice quiet block until those hydrants were repainted.

I confess, though, that I was kidding about the dogs. They still love the hydrants. Their color vision isn't as good as ours, so they aren't as offended by the color selections. Never hire a dog to redo the living room.