Please Kill Me if I get Mean

I said to my husband this past weekend: Please just kill me if I get mean when I get old. He blinked a few times. I felt like an explanation was in order. Take for instance my little Grandma who has dementia and hits people. Granted, it's like getting hit with a really tiny popcorn fart, but still somewhere in her brain she is super pissed. He said calmly and carefully like one who is aware that there is thin ice somewhere....I won't let you get mean. Besides, you'll have a dog. You'll have a reason to live and not be mean.

I pondered this. The lady I had met yesterday had a tiny dog with one tooth that growled and eighteen cats. Wasn't buying the dog thing. It was a toss up if the little fur ball was more mean than the owner.

He went on. A GOOD dog. Besides we all know cats don't count as we are dog people.

Baby, I said....near tears. Yesterday was HARD! I got yelled at twice by people I was trying to help! Why are they so mean? I had meant to hang around home on our Veterans Day holiday. The fam was off school and work and I had plans of some easy emailing and scrapbooking. Instead, I knew that I had a contractor visiting a lady who hadn't had her gas on in over two months and was living without her furnace, stove, hot water heater and dryer. We needed to meet up and sign some paperwork and I needed to beg in person that the guy running the gas lines got everything working. Her natural gas supplier had basically locked out her gas as all the lines were leaking inside her house. It's a wonder she hadn't blown herself up due to smoking like a fiend.

Here in New York, we are in the middle of our first real cold snap this winter and heating guys are busier than a one eyed cat watching nine rat holes. Besides, the heating dude had previously complained about the two cat boxes full of little toosie rolls and unpleasant odors and I wanted to show solidarity. I would have slipped a twelve pack in his van, but I wasn't sure if he would get in trouble or not.

Lady without gas was super bitchy. I'd have been far more understanding if she had not rescheduled the tech which pushed the whole process out a week further. I had called the Heating company up to check the time of the appointment and the local peeps knew her by name, which meant she had been harassing them.

Several hours earlier I had gotten yelled at by a lady because we hadn't sent her an application yet to see if she qualified for our emergency repair grant. I was suspicious that she was the one that was horrid to us previously when she had requested a new stove and it arrived without a large enough window to see into the oven. Turns out I was right and she blistered my ear about not coming to pick up the new free stove that she hadn't wanted as she had bought her own. I happened to know for a fact that we would have picked it up and used it at the next Habitat House if she had given us that option. I hung up on her saying to call back when she could be civil.

Not everyone is mean thankfully or I'd be running for the hills. In fact I've met some very nice people lately. One sweet old lady has an 80 lb lap dog named Buddy so I suspect my husband's theory is correct. Buddy was bark bark barking at us from his dog house as we filled out paperwork so we can try to help his dog Mom with her leaking roof. The lady of the house said that Buddy doesn't like to be far from her and that he often times climbs up in her easy chair while she is sitting in it. I could tell, Buddy is a GOOD dog.

Well, onward and upward. Here's to a new week which hopefully will contain a lot less yelling.