Pet Peeves, Some Controversial

1) Pre-printed holiday cards, especially the ones with the family picture on them that say, "Happy Holidays from the Harrises." That's weak, people. Take the extra time to write a personal note to people, especially if they are the type of people with whom your only communication is the damn holiday card. I'd rather a smart ass, "Hi! I'm still alive!" on my card than an impersonal family portrait. I get that you're trying to save time, but really, it's just rude and telling people you're too busy for them. I'd rather not get sent a card at all than to have to figure out what to do with another holiday card from Shutterfly. I hate those things. With a fiery passion that is reserved for people who don't use turn signals or cart corrals.

2) People whose profile pictures are pictures of someone else, particularly their children. Look, it's fine if you want to use an inanimate object to represent yourself. Maybe you don't want your pictures on the Interwebs for all the world to see. That's cool, yo. For the longest time my picture was flowers (ironic that since I dislike most flowers) so I don't mean to say that your profile picture has to be a picture of you. BUT, don't put your kid's picture up there. Last I checked, you were your own damn person and not your kid. So don't. Just don't. Unless you want an irate email from me. Which, maybe that's your thing. See how razzed up you can get NGS.

3) Wet Octobers. Frankly, I didn't know this was a pet peeve until this past month. The rain people. It is killing me. We try to plan exciting Halloween-activities like corn mazes and haunted houses and ghost tours, only to be constantly discouraged by the weather. Either it is raining and I don't want to stand out in the rain for hours and hours in the rain or it has just finished raining and everything is soggy. Even as I type this, the rain is pouring down outside my window.

Also, the overabundance of rain this month (it's like 350% above normal) means that the trees aren't really changing color. The leaves are simply falling off. Estoy mal.

4) The water situation in our apartment building. We get charged for water in our building in a very unfair way. Basically, our management company is too cheap to meter the individual units, so they get a bill for our building and then divide it up by the number of occupied units and we all get to pay an even share. Which is just plain silly because some units have only one person in them, some have up to four or five, some units have babies, some don't, some have dishwashers, some don't. It's just ridiculous and every time I write out the check for water, I feel my blood pressure rising at the simply unfairness of it all.

Let's not even get into how we have to pay to use the washer and the dryer but then pay AGAIN because the water used by the washer is also figured into our water bill. *sigh* I clearly need to stop overthinking the water thing and just be happy we have safe water available.

5) The Simpson's postage stamps. Why aren't they cooler looking? I mean, seriously. Did Matt Groening have a say in which images were used? Because, other than the Maggie stamp, they are all spectacularly boring. Just saying.