the moral implications of killing ants

So I was thinking today about killing ants.
My new place, when I went to look at it, was occupied by more ants than I would expect to see in a 30 minute period, so I suspect there will be an ant problem. I'm not completely grossed out by ants, but I don't want them getting in to my food or my dog food, so I was considering what I might do, when I move in, to be rid of them.

The ant killing product most prominent in the media is what came to mind first 'Raid'. Now, as I understand it, Raid ant bait is designed so that the ant find its, takes it home to the nest, feeds it to the queen, and the entire colony dies.

I figure this is a pretty good way to go, ants can go all kinds of places dogs can't so they'll be easy to bait right? But then I got to thinking about the poor aunt that brings the raid back to the nest. In the commercials, the ants all realize at the last minute that they've been poisoned and they all yell "RAID!" and panic.

So what happens if the ant that takes my Raid, feeds it to the queen, and the queen dies, and all the ants, go "It's raid!" and then turn on the poor ant that brought it in to the nest? What if they blame the poor guy for it and get all violent towards him? What if he's already a consistent screw up who gets picked on by the other ants anyway? I could destroy any chance he ever had of redemption.

I don't know if I could do that.

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I thought I had skin cancer

But it was just grape freezie drippings. All is well.

It does not!

Today a customer walked into the kennel and the first thing they said to me was that it "smells in here".

I was upset. I had been cleaning all morning! The only reason it smells is because their stupid dog won't stop peeing on it's blankets.

I may pick up shit for a living, but I take pride in my work, lady!

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Badger is a moray eel

I'm just going to let you think about that one for awhile.
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I'm getting rid of the internet.

I can't afford it.
So I am getting rid of it for a little while.

I can still check emails at work, and might be on a free connection occasionally, but I'm canceling my account with shaw. It will probably take a month, because they make you give a month notice.

Anyway, I'm probably the only one who will notice. So nobody panic.

That person in the parking lot.

Yesterday I was that person.

We all know that person. The parking lot of our destination is really crowded, crowded beyond reason even, and you see this person getting in their car with their shopping bags. A spot! They are about to drive away and give up their spot!

But then they don't drive away. They sit in their car, engine idling, fiddling with something in their lap forever until you eventually give up and park five blocks away and walk back to the mall or something like that.

Anyway. Today I have a new understanding for those people, because yesterday the stuff in my lap was far more important than some stranger's desire for my parking space.

I went to bed the night before with a painfully sore throat. I woke up yesterday morning and it was worse. But I have to work before normal people get out of bed and I don't know where to find a 24h source of relief, so I had to get through my whole work day, and sit around and wait for a client to show, who never showed, before I could get to a store to buy throat drop things. They are lucky I didn't rip the bag open in the store. So when I got in to my car you bet I wasn't going anywhere until I had a halls in my mouth!
Then the package turned out to be really hard to open and then all the inside bits were all individually wrapped and I dropped one on the floor and had to start over. So somebody had to wait to get my parking spot. And now we know that it isn't always about fixing makeup or fiddling with your manly sunglasses. Sometimes it's about life and death access to sore throat relief.

My guitar is for sale on kijiji!

But Monika? You sold your guitar on kijiji last summer.
This is true! I did!

Last summer in a desperate need of money (that persists to this day) I sold a number of my personal belongings on ebay and kijiji. Among those belongings was the focus of my illustrious music career.

As we all know from my dog theme song posting, I have zero musical talent. Just the same my parents, being good and nurturing people, catered to my desire to become a famous country music star and purchased me a guitar for my birthday. I want to say that it was my 9th or 10th birthday.

They did it in a horribly misguided way though. You see, I had unwrapped my gifts and they brought me a half full trash bag and told me I was now responsible for cleaning up my wrapping paper mess. Blasphemy! So I started to shove the paper into the bag, but then I started to temper tantrum. You see I was only mildly cranky about having to clean up my wrapping paper. Mike and Tris never had to clean up the wrapping paper on their birthdays! But I was more so upset by the fact that something inside the bag kept poking me and scratching my hand every time I tried to shove the paper in beside it. Not only had they brought me a trash bag, but it was a dangerous tetanus infected trap of a trash bag. As I was starting to cry, and everyone watching me grew increasingly impatient (and no one, I think to this day realizes why, so I am going to make this very clear, I was being cut poked and scratched and it HURT you heartless monsters!) my brother, never discreet about these things screamed at me to look in the bag. There I found my first guitar, and the reason it was scratching and cutting me was that the ends of steel guitar strings are very very sharp. They don't tell you that on country music radio.

Along with said guitar I was given a video cassette to teach me how to play it. I watched the tape once, it went too fast, and I spent about a year strumming tunelessly until my parents got me lessons from some spanish fellow. I successfully made it to the end of my first lesson book and performed in one recital, before losing all interest in playing the guitar and quitting my lessons. Tada!

I went all through junior high school never touching my guitar. I may have continued in this fashion for the rest of my life were it not for an odd little accident.

My parents don't know about this part yet.

We had a tour of the high school, at the end of which we were supposed to select our first year high school courses. During that tour we were to go from class to class, out of those we had shown interest in and written down on our mock schedule for the tour day. At some point someone asked me if I needed directions. I stated "No! I know exactly where I am going!" because I had big brothers in high school and therefore must know everything about going to high school. Of course I got lost, but I didn't want to have to go back to the teacher who had asked if I needed directions because what if he was my teacher in a class later and he thought that I was some kind of idiot and he made me sit in the front and constantly asked me "Now Monika, are you sure you don't need help with this? Remember when you got lost?"

I was not going to let that happen. So I ducked in to what I hoped was the classroom for theater tech. It wasn't. It was the guitar class. I was so unable to give up my 'I meant to be here' charade that not only did I sit through the information session, I actually registered in the class. It was entirely against my will, I felt I had to. I even feigned unbridled excitement at home, telling my parents all about guitar class and how awesome it was going to be.

It actually was awesome. I enjoyed it very much, I practiced at home almost every day and definitely every weekend when I hauled my guitar to and from school in three feet of snow up hill both ways. (This is 100% true, see the school was across the river valley, so I had to go down hill, then up hill to get there, and then down hill and up hill again to go home, and sometimes the snow on the hill drifted, so it was really deep).

Guitar class was when I got my second guitar. How could someone who was so untalented and so disinterested in playing a guitar come in to possession of two whole guitars? Well about a week in to class I was struggling to play my first guitar, and when my teacher looked at it we found that the neck was being pulled away from the body by the tension on the strings. My guitar was literally about to fold itself in half. That meant it would never stay in tune, and my strings were more than an inch from the frets in some places, making it painful and pretty much impossible to play. Dad bought me a new guitar, it was red.

I honestly loved my guitar class. I got an A. But the moment my grades no longer depended on playing the guitar I lost interest all over again in learning to play the guitar. Truth was, in order to get that A all I did was memorize the songs we learned, never properly learned to read music, and would never be able to play anything by ear. It was nothing but robotic finger here, strum, finger here, strum, etc. I bluffed my way all through guitar class, even before I registered.

I pulled the guitar out occasionally throughout high school and even packed it off to university for awhile, where I was too embarrassed to play it, in case someone heard me struggling through Danny Boy or that song from Titanic, then it returned to my closet until I decided to rid myself of the shame and disappointment of my musical failure. My brother Tristan and I smashed my broken guitar in the driveway like rock stars and then I listed my second guitar up for sale. It sold to a fellow in Lethbridge who was looking for a guitar for one of his students, since I was driving to Lethbridge on weekends for flyball I agreed to deliver it.

And that is where this story begins!

Because look, my guitar is for sale on kijiji! I almost want to buy it back. Don't, under any circumstances, allow me to do that.




I was browsing the ads and thought to myself, 'That looks like my guitar, so I clicked on the ad' and low and behold, it is my guitar. Know how I can tell? Because those are my books and that is my tuner. The fact that I needed an electronic tuner should suggest that I had no chance as a musician.


But lots of people use beginner books to learn beginner guitar, and lots of people use tuners because they have no chance at ever being a professional musician. But how many people have a gig bag that was patched up by my mother? (Those strings really are sharp you know, they ripped my gig bag).



That is most definitely my guitar.

Why do I care? Because the ad is full of lies! He is mis-representing my guitar!

"It has only been played a handful of times" That's not true! I played it every day for an entire semester. That is a lot more than a handful. Perhaps he only played it a handful of times, which only goes to show that I was way more dedicated of a musician that he was.

"has been kept in a safe place away from pets, and children." Definitely not true. It was stored in a dog hair filled closet and I took it baby sitting with me sometimes because young children are infinitely impressed when you can play just one song on a guitar. It was also kept in a house with smokers for awhile!

I hate when people misrepresent my things. On the other hand, it's nice to know that someone else in this world sucks at guitar and decided to sell their symbol of failure on the internet as well.

This post is far too long for me to check for typos, so you're just going to have to politely ignore them.

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Dog Songs

So, in case you haven't already figured it out. I'm a bit of a geek, and sentimental to boot.

When I worked at Cochrane Humane Society I started to do this weird little thing when no one was around. I sang songs to the dogs.

See, the dogs barked a lot, and sometimes they were skittish fearful things. My singing served a dual purpose. It shut them up, and it calmed their nerves. It should be very clear that I am a terrible singer. In no way am I claiming that I soothed savage beasts with the sound of my singing voice. Most likely I sounded so terrible that the barking ones were stunned to silence, and the fearful ones decided I must be so mentally deficient so as to be no threat to their well being whatsoever.

It started out innocently enough. I would just sing whatever I'd heard on the radio on the way to work that morning. But then it started to not be enough. I couldn't sing 'Island in the Sun' to the wooly mammoth malemute cross, he'd die of heat stroke! Soon I started to come across this problem with other dogs and other songs. I may want to sing 'The End of the World' to the best of my recollection, but that would probably terrify the already trembling pug, and 'Run Runaway' would be a really bad idea for a dog who was surrendered for, well, always running away from home. You can understand my predicament. So... every dog had to have his or her own individual song.

'Run runaway' worked for an old border collie named max because "I like black and white. Dream in black and white" and the nervous stumpy who likes to lead on his walks got a round of "following the leader the leader the leader. Following the leader where ever he may go". Mercedes the heeler "Lord won't you buy me a mercedes benz?" and the big mutt in holding? "If you can't run with the big dogs big dog let me walk you out". The really whiny whimpery ones got some Aaron English "oh lover go on and cry me all the waters of this world, and I'll row you home"

Every day was a new and exciting soundtrack based on who had come in, who had been adopted out, etc.

I did not sing to the cats.

Cats deserve nothing but stony silence!

Eventually this seeped out of the work place and into my home and Kodi got his very own theme song.




I have to use a youtube video, because I have no idea how to get stuff off my itunes on to my blog. It's probably not legal to try anyway.
I picked this song while laying in my dorm room at university pining for my Kodi. This was back when I had marvelous dreams of traveling the world and hoped that Kodi understood that no matter how many times I left him, I belonged to him.
As it turns out I no longer have those dreams. I wouldn't dream of being anywhere where Kodi couldn't be too.


I left my job at the shelter, and my dog theme songs were reduced to one. Just Kodi's. The insanity ends there does it not? I made a full recovery and no longer assign songs to dogs right?

Wrong.

The other day I caught myself for the hundredth time dancing about my living room with Badger in my arms singing this over and over again.



What better song for my floppy, baby blue eyed black and white boy?

Yeah. I'm a geek. But does your dog have his own theme song? Didn't think so.

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How I gave the bank $65 for a coffee

This is the story of how I paid the bank $65 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel at Tim Hortons. It is a tale of great misfortune and woe.

See, I always set my credit card payments up on the computer. This involves an elaborate scheme whereby I keep my interest payments at a minimum for my credit line. (It actually isn't exceptionally elaborate at all, I just like to think I'm being clever). This means that when I set up the payments I don't only have to set up the payment for the credit card, I have to set up a short series of fund transfers between accounts. To ensure that this works to my benefit, I even make it so these transfers occur 24 hours apart, so that there is plenty of time to ensure there is enough money in the account.

Anyway, those are boring details.
The important thing to note is that I always have everything under control!

So it just happened that this last month this intricate money juggling (again, not actually intricate, but that makes me feel important) occurred at about the same time as a flyball tournament, and this is where things start to fall apart.

Saturday morning: I was running late, but I had no cash to pay for lunch and couldn't remember whether there was an ATM on site so I drove like a... a race car driver... a really fast one... to the bank and hit the drive through ATM. I only wanted $60, so I could have enough for two days of lunches, some raffle tickets, and dinner with the team Saturday night. But the ATM didn't offer $60 as an option.
Yes, I know you can punch in the exact amount you want, so long as it is divisible by 20, but what you seem to forget is that I was in a hurry! I had no time to punch in five whole keys on the little keypad! (you're going to say, "but, Monika, you only need to hit four keys" but you have forgotten the decimal, silly you. Though I understand I may in fact not know how to use an ATM and perhaps you don't need to put in the decimal when all you want is $60. I have been doing it this way for 100 years though, so I'm not changing now!) I was not sure that $40 would be enough for the weekend, because I wanted to order meat at dinner, I love meat. So I hit the button for $100. This was a mistake!

I collected my $100 and sped off to flyball, slowing down drastically upon entering Coaldale because I did not want to have to give the policeman my $100 for speeding. He was there, sitting by the side of the road as I suspected he would be.

Success, I arrived in time, possibly two minutes late, but no one noticed and crisis was averted. Surely my team could not do without my extra slow dog, my anti-ringer as my good friend Galen has dubbed him, and they would definitely fall apart without my elite box loading skills. (They don't know that I secretly panic every race because I can never figure out who is running second and I am always in constant fear that the little mini balls will fall out of the box and everyone will be sad :( ) All that means nothing though, because I was not late, and the peasants rejoiced "yay!".

I ate meat for dinner and saw that it was good.

Sunday: I woke up early. It was by accident, so I decided to leave early too because there was nothing on TV and if I laid down on the couch to watch nothing then I would have fallen asleep again and might never have made it.
I also thought it was awesome that I had enough time to drive the speed limit and stop at Tim Hortons for a coffee and a breakfast bagel. Even better, I had so much time that when I got to the tournament I was able to sit peacefully in my car and eat my bagel and drink my coffee without dogs barking at the air and people needing me for things. Don't get me wrong, I like to be needed, and I love helping.

However, this was my second mistake, and combined with the first mistake, it was fatal. I paid for my coffee and bagel with my debit card. I did this because Tim Hortons is from the prehistoric age and won't take credit card. I also wanted to save my cash, in case the price of lunch had drastically increased over night. Plus, I wanted just a few more raffle tickets.

About a week later I decided to check my bank accounts.

This is when I discovered that my credit card payment had not gone through.

Ridiculous! My credit card payment always goes through! I always make sure I have enough money in my account plus a little extra, to pay my credit card. In fact, I know for a fact I had just over $100 in my bank account over what I owed the credit... card... oh... $100. Just over.

I checked the balance of my bank account, and I compared it to my credit card bill. I was short the price of a coffee and a bagel at Tim Hortons.

Curse you Tim Hortons!

That is the story of how I had to pay the bank $65 in interest for a bagel and a coffee.

The end.

PS: Can you spot the comma splice? (hint: there is probably not just one)

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