My water bill for the beach house arrived. It was $2500. Someone had left the hose running in the front yard. It could’ve been me. It could’ve been my neighbor. At any rate, I finally got the adjusted bill with $1900 taken off. Yes, I still have to pay $600, but that is much more do-able than $2500. I got a letter saying to call to set up a payment system so I wouldn’t be charged any late fees.
The woman on the other end of the line helped me and asked about my barking dog. Pepper heard a car or the Amazon truck and was at the front door going at it. I mentioned that she had a little pit bull in her, and the woman revealed that she had a house full of pit bulls and one Shih tzu. Then she told me the sad story of having to put down the first pit bull she ever had, the one named Blue.
Blue was a blue and white pittie boy, and he slept in bed with her from the first night. As an adult, he developed a stomach tumor and the vet wanted to put him down the day she discovered it. The woman wanted to take Blue home and love him for as long as she could. He lasted a few more months. The vet said that when the tumor burst, he would go fast. That’s what happened. He yelped, and he was gone.
Blue sired four litters of pitties. The woman kept one from each litter, all the ones that looked like their dad. She could’ve talked another half hour about her dogs. That’s the good thing about being retired. I can let service people on the phone take a minute to stop doing their job and just be human. How will robots ever replace human voices providing service over the phone? I don’t see how.
I found this photo online of a blue and white pit bull. Maybe Blue had these markings and maybe he didn’t. But the good news is that we both agreed that pit bulls have taken a bad rap for a long time. She didn’t want one in her house at first when her uncle moved in and brought Blue with him. Now she knows they can be as sweet as the next dog if well-trained. They still look scary to me, but that’s my problem, not theirs.
Everyone who meets Pepper comments on the shape of her head, which is more like a pit bull than a labrador. Pepper is a very sweet dog for the most part. She got a little competitive when Crazy Daisy moved in. They get along fine, now that we took Daisy’s anxiety down a notch by putting her on Prozac. She used to be all about killing stuff (she’s a Jack Russell). But nowadays she is too mellow to kill a rat. She even wags her tail now. Whenever I head out to the garage, she goes with me. She knows there’s a rat living under the metal shelving. I know this because I used to store bags of ruffles in the garage and there would be holes in the bags or ruffles pulled halfway out of the bags. I drenched some paper towels with peppermint oil and stuck them under the shelving.
My adult child’s car had some rat damage this month. A rat chewed through some wires, and the car wouldn’t shut off. That is fixed now. We’ve tried peppermint oil, garlic, pepper flakes, and cayenne pepper under the hoods of our cars to repel the rats. When my windshield needed to be replaced two years ago, the glass guys found a nest under a panel up against the windshield. How weird to think that I was driving rats around with me.
But I digress . . .
Here’s to human voices on the other end of the line and to well-behaved pit bulls. And here’s to getting rid of rats.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 