I have great parents

...and although there are many reasons I say that, there are a few that particularly stand out in my mind tonight.

For one, my parents taught me to turn off the light when I leave a room. Granted, this message didn't sink in until I had my own home and had to pay for the electricity I used (age 25), but those twenty-five years of reminding, cajoling, and scolding me to please turn off the lights when I left the room - even insisting that I leave the dinner table to turn off the lights in my bedroom in the middle of dinner - paid off. I now pay around $18.00 per month for electricity. Not bad, eh?

I'm also grateful that my parents instilled in me a sense of shame. For instance, if someone called me and told me I owed them money, I wouldn't rest or enjoy a moment's peace of conscience until I had paid them back. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I wasn't keeping my word to honor my debts. Working as a collections specialist, however, makes me suspect that my parents are the exception rather than the rule on this one. I speak to people each day that are indignant, offended, and even downright vitriolic when I bring it to their attention that they owe our company hundreds of dollars. And those are just the people who will speak to me. The rest ignore my calls and e-mails, disconnect their phones, and completely dismiss me as and their debt as a minor nuisance. Our outside collections agency often doesn't fare any better trying to harrow up people's sense of guilt and honor. Although having a conscience can be somewhat of a drag at times, I'm grateful that my parents taught me to be a person other people could trust, and a person that I could like at the end of the day.

Finally, I'm really glad that my parents taught me to take care of my things and live like a decent person. Again, this lesson took some learning - my room sometimes resembled a lab of petri dishes with the number of cups of tea I neglected for days, I had (and still have) a pile problem, my stepdad "affectionately" referred to areas cluttered with remnants of my recent activities as "Camp Katie," and my mom and sister still shudder at the memory of the week they had to clean out my room so Jim could repaint it while I was a camp counselor. But I have since taken their lessons to heart as I have lived with roommates and now that I have my own home and family. For instance, I take pride in grooming the lawn and keeping our walkway and stairs free of leaves. Our area of the laundry room is clutter-free and our laundry is always removed promptly. I carefully vacuum and dust the inside of my truck and never have to move crap so someone can catch a ride with me. And I take out the trash. Every Monday night, the garbage can is at the curb, ready for pickup the next morning. If every so often I forget, Kenny makes sure the trash is where it needs to be before Tuesday dawns. It's a courtesy to everyone, really - to us because we'll always be able to take the inside trash out to the can and have a proper place to put it, to our neighbors as there is never garbage where it doesn't belong, to the guys who pick up the trash each week because the trash can will always be liftable and won't be disgorging trash, and to the neighborhood as no one wants neighbors who can't clean up after themselves.

And yet despite my conscientious care for my home and belongings, I have those exact neighbors. For the past few weeks, our upstairs neighbors have been hoarding trash outside. There are bags, boxes, and plastic trash cans sitting next to the garage, crammed together and nearly bursting with garbage. Big deal, you think - it's Utah in the late spring. What's the problem? Well, why not imagine a large cardboard box crammed with trash just tossed in (not even bagged) in the rain? Yep - it has been raining this past week or so just about every day. I can only imagine the grossness of actually picking up that box to set it out on the curb, only to have the soggy and probably mildewy bottom of the box give way. Ewwww. And the plastic bags? Hey, even plastic degrades out in the elements. Besides, once the girls stuffed a bunch of garbage into a shopping bag, which Kenny moved to the curb with their trash can, and when he got home on Tuesday evening, he discovered that the garbage collectors had left it there and only touched the waste-management-issued can. What is in the can is all they are going to bother with. Tonight is trash-to-the-curb night, and I'll bet you that when tomorrow comes, there will only be one trash can out on the curb in front of our house, and it won't be theirs.

Pictures just to really capture the nastiness (but not the smell):



A rain-soaked rug that's been outside since the upstairs tenants moved in. Did they just not want it? Who do they think is going to take care of it?



And the back lawn. This is their responsibility, and yet the cleared area you can see was done by me and Kenny. Kenny spent a week wheezing and coughing after he cleared that area - his allergies and asthma can't handle the mess. I just don't understand it.