I think the guy upstairs is throwing himself on the floor

It's really the only explanation for the noise, really.

Every day, usually in the afternoon or sometimes in the evening, we hear a LOUD thump, thump, thump, thump (repeated a lot) from upstairs. At first I thought maybe Man Upstairs was dribbling a basketball on his floor/our ceiling. Or a medicine ball. Because people do that, right?

But then yesterday, as I ate lunch with new friends in our kitchen, it sounded like the Man Upstairs was throwing himself on the ground. This wasn't a thump. It was a loud thunder. Repeatedly. What are we supposed to do about that?

Because the thing is, we don't know who the guy is. We only know it's a guy because sometimes we hear him walking around upstairs and he sounds like a guy when he walks. So we can't really go up and say, "Hey, you ok?" when we hear the thumps. And I've tried pounding on the walls (not out of frustration...just...to alert him to the noise) and that doesn't work either. Maybe he's deaf ("Justice for Gallaudet!")? Or maybe he just doesn't care? Or maybe he, like the guy in "Devil in the White City" is killing people and lugging them off to a furnace in his apartment. I mean it happened once. Seriously. Read the book. It's true.

Either way, between the radiators and the loud neighbor, sleep hasn't been coming so much the last few nights. Here's hoping we have a freakily warm winter here in Chicago and Man Upstairs stops, well...doing whatever it is he's doing.