Dammitall

This weekend marked the third occasion that my partner's coworker's daughter (30 years of age, currently unemployed) has come to take care of our pets while we were out of town for the weekend. She has experience working in a vet's office and our pets (two cats and a greyhound) are well behaved to begin with, so we have little to no concern about the animals being in her care.

Also to her credit, we came home to find that her boyfriend had thoroughly mowed and weedwhacked our back yard, leaving it in much better condition than it had been when we left last Thursday night. In fact, the house was generally in better condition than we had left it.

This all makes me want to know whether I'm overreacting to a couple of things that have gotten under my skin after she has spent time in our house:

- The first time she came to pet sit for us, I discovered that she'd clogged the toilet but never mentioned anything about it to us (the clog was stuck in the trap, so not visible in the bowl). I can understand her not wanting to make a big deal out of it out of embarrassment, but to me it seems worse to say nothing and then have the owners of the house come back and make a potentially unpleasant discovery after using the bathroom.

- At least twice she has used my partner's hair brush, as evidenced by the many long black hairs of hers left behind on it. That just seems odd to me. First of all, if you have that much hair and are going to be staying somewhere else for several days, wouldn't you have brought along your own hair brush? Second, why do you want to be using someone else's hair brush to begin with, especially when it's been well used by its owner?

- I have a feeling she (or her boyfriend) may have used up most of the remaining liquid dish soap we had in a bottle by the kitchen sink for the dishwasher, even though we had two brand new boxes of powder detergent for it under the sink. Another assumption on my part, but the bottle was at least half full when we left, and we have a scrub brush full of liquid detergent in plain view by the sink to use to clean the dishes. Another thought: isn't it fairly common knowledge these days that using liquid dish soap in a dishwasher designed for powder might end up being a really bad idea?

- The glass lamp we have on our bedside table was on the floor between the table and the bed when I came upstairs Sunday evening after we arrived home. Fortunately it wasn't broken, but I'd like to know what it was doing on the floor. The thing isn't dainty and its falling to the floor should not have gone unnoticed.

- Perhaps most annoying of all was my discovery that the lid on a bottle of Tylenol PM in the medicine cabinet hadn't been snapped onto the bottle. As I was getting ready for bed Sunday night, my hand brushed against the bottle (I'm a bit spastic) and knocked it off the shelf, and candy-coated Tylenol PM tablets went flying everywhere. This is hazardous for pets, particularly our greyhound, who doesn't exactly exercise discretion when she picks things up off the floor with her mouth, especially when they're bite sized, sweet and meant for human consumption. Yeah, I was pretty pissed about that.

I won't go into it about the glasses, pots and pans being put back into the wrong cabinets, because I understand her and her boyfriend not knowing where things belong in an unfamiliar house, and having several pieces out of the cabinets at once makes it much more difficult to remember where they came from. So no need to mention that...

But for the other things, am I being overly anal and getting worked up for no reason? Is it worth mentioning anything to her about them, or should I just let them slide? Or does anyone else feel like these sorts of things would have sparked a reaction similar to mine, of surprise and mild to moderate annoyance?

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If one million people replaced a two mile car trip once a week with a bike ride, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 50,000 tons per year. If one out of ten car commuters switched to a bike, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 25.4 million tons per year. [2milechallenge.com]