I sit here in my favourite leather armchair with an XO in one hand enjoying the peace and quiet, the children asleep and Kay out. It has been a hell of a month.

The kids went back to school, Edwin to his first full-time class, Merinda to her first year of real school; we discovered a $10k mistake we failed to trap in our house financing; Kay managed to get ticketed for failing to fully stop at a stop sign; Kay's Dad Denis and her stepmother Lynne are separating after 21 years; Kay managed to dent the Mazda; there is a sudden issue with our Sydney apartment and changing capital gains tax rules; Amelia is considering dropping out of high school; and we have started filming location scenes for "Secret Play". Work has also become busy. So busy that the mail lady delivered a pile of letters and journals to my cube with the sad news that she could no longer stuff anything more in my mail slot.

So exactly how do you know when things are "quiet"? In discussing with my colleague Tony exactly what we might look for in a house, I wondered how to define this, and I consulted Glenn. Acoustic quietness in a domestic situation means 30dBA inside the modern house, 40dBA outside. "Watch out for freeways", quoth Glenn, "they are line sources, of course!". Our meter runs out about 40dBA. This house does fall below that, at night, limited by Route 12 over the hill and through the sound walls, but I have been hard pressed to discover this level. We run the main PC 24/7 in the study, giving 43dBA since the disk drive went a bit noisy; elsewhere, the refrigerator cuts on periodically, the splashing in the fish tank exceeds that, and the crickets outside are louder still and utterly drown out any traffic noise on a summer night: 60dBA at times. The dining room fountain and the garden sprinklers are almost up there with the crickets. Few of the above are audible if the kids are awake, over the thudding of little feet, the chatter and yells, the video, the click and clatter of the motors and sound chips in various toys. I do not get to know about quiet even when it is there.

Work is worse. My cube is exposed to about 68dBA, mostly air conditioning and instrument fans. Downstairs in cubes near the VP it is 6dB quieter, in the lab 6dB louder.

With my eyes closed I can make believe that I am in this armchair, but in my loungeroom in Chelmsford Street. The water running into the trout tank would be the sound of Stretch splashing around his tank in pursuit of a mosquito fish, but he will soon stop for a rest. With my eyes closed I can see a neat room instead of carpet and tables strewn with papers, crayons, toys, casually-discarded clothes and shoes. Either a warm, unruffled bed or a stroll downtown for a midnight feast of tandoori or falafel are my most appealing options. Now a cynic might blame all this on love, and if you accept as a curse the Chinese wish that one live in interesting times, I am under a mighty powerful curse. Nevertheless, to continue Mr Buckley's metaphor, we may be under a brief seige, but my throne is not broken, my hair is not cut, and nobody is about to shoot me in the back. The crickets and sprinklers and little feet are welcome to banish the silence. It is good to be kept on your toes. Just not all the time.