I saw my dentist last June for a checkup on a Saturday morning. They scheduled the next appointment for a Saturday morning in December. I got three different texts and emails the week before confirming my appointment.

I showed up about ten minutes before my appointment to find the door unlocked and the office completely empty. I tried the emergency on-call number. No one responded. I finally called the police because I didn’t want to leave the office empty and unlocked.

It turned out they had stopped doing Saturday office hours, and they didn’t bother to call me and reschedule. Monday morning they called me because, in their words, I didn’t show up for my appointment. I told them no, I was there; they weren’t.

They couldn’t get me in for an appointment in December before my deductible reset. In fact, they couldn’t find another time that worked for me until August.

I’ll be seeing a new dentist next month.

We sometimes rent out our upstairs (which has a kitchenette) on Airbnb. We’ve had perfect reviews so far — people have complimented us on how great the place is, how clean it is, and how much they like it. One guest even compared it to a five-star hotel in their review!

On Friday evening, we get in a guest. They check in late at 11:00 pm and compliment us on the place. However, we hear the guest leave and it doesn’t appear they come back for the night for some reason. At 6:00 am on Saturday, we hear pounding on the door upstairs so loudly that the entire house is shaking. My husband peeks out the window close to the stairs leading up to the door and asks the intruder to leave, who identifies himself as a friend of our guest. He goes back and forth many times with the guy, refusing to let him in, and the guy keeps repeating, “Well, what am I going to do?”

Not our problem, buddy. He leaves and I go back to sleep, while my husband cannot sleep.

Later on that day, the guest returns and invites the friend (who was banging on the door) in. They spend the evening being kind of loud and obnoxious, and we text the guest, asking that the friend leave for the night (since the suite was booked by only the guest) and reminding them that they need to be quiet at 11:00 pm. We don’t think the friend ever leaves, and the same noisy routine repeats the following evening.

The morning the guest and friend leave, I go upstairs to see the condition of the suite. To my horror, it reeks of cigarette smoke. Upset, I simply message the guest to inform them of this. The guest then calls a while later, insisting that there’s no way it smells like smoke, that they only smoked outside, and denying over and over that the place could actually smell like smoke.

Thankfully, after airing the suite out (including during a snowstorm, so we have to get the snow out of the suite), the smell disappears completely. I message the guest to update them and thank them for clarifying that they, in fact, did not smoke inside.

Sadly, the guest leaves us a negative review, saying that they wouldn’t recommend staying there and that I wasn’t “nice.” They then give us one-star reviews each for cleanliness and for accuracy. For some reason, even though they initially told us the suite was great, they are so upset about the conversation about the smell that they’ve decided to ding us for things that were actually not an issue.

Oh, and our house rules stated that no smoking was allowed on the premises, but the guest was smoking on the balcony and left ashes everywhere. I also find remnants of a joint they were rolling up in the crevices of the coffee table.

I have no patience left for people who refuse to take accountability for their actions, and the app wouldn’t do anything for us, saying that the ratings and review would stay.

I don’t think we will be hosting anyone else anytime soon.

A customer of mine had furniture delivered and was telling me how much she loved it. She just mentioned in passing that, per Sod’s law, her cat had scratched a leatherette dining seat pad. She wasn’t asking for anything; it was just a normal conversation.

The next day, I checked, and we had a damaged set of those chairs out back, so I looked up the woman’s order. I offered her a replacement out of that pack.

She was thrilled — so thrilled she wrote to head office to praise me.

They then chewed me out as I technically shouldn’t have done that; it wasn’t a store or manufacturing fault. Go figure.

Some years back, my dogs went on an “adventure” hike, which wouldn’t have been bad, except they did it all on their own.

I was working in my home office when I heard frantic barking from our three dogs who were out in our large, fenced-in backyard. Then silence. I ran down to check on them and they were all gone. I quickly checked the gates (closed) and along the fence and found a spot in a wooded area where they had dug under the fence and, despite the small space, had squirmed out. I could tell from the fur caught on the bottom of the fence.

We live in a wooded area above a wetland area where a spring-fed stream flows through that feeds into a nearby large river. There were houses up behind the tops of the bluffs, but otherwise, it was just woods and the grassy wetland area for miles around. The woods in most areas were thick with a brushy, thorny, invasive plant (buckthorn), which made it hard to move around or even see very far. I started looking for them in the woods as best I could, and my nearest neighbor came out and said he’d seen them run past his house possibly chasing after a deer.

I spent the next four hours walking through the woods calling out for the dogs, putting up posters along the roads, and stopping and asking people who were out and about if they’d seen them, but there was no sign of them. My wife got home from work and joined in the search, as did some of the neighbors. It was starting to get late, and I was really getting worried that we’d not find them before dark, if ever.

As my wife made her way along one of the bluffs above the wetland area, she saw some motion way across the stream and in the grassy area. It was our bigger dog who was looking her way and running back and forth at the edge of the stream. She kept calling to him, and he finally crossed the stream and clambered up the bluff to her.

Our dogs generally stick together, so we figured the other two must be over in that same area. I drove around to the other side of the stream and began making my way down it toward where the first one had been, calling out the dogs’ names. I was just to the edge of the wetland when I heard a bark from one of the two still missing. I called again and got another bark.

I made my way toward where I heard him and found him and his always quiet sister stuck behind an area of heavy brush and fallen trees, frantically trying to figure out how to get to me. I pushed my way through and was reunited with the two completely filthy, totally worn out, but deliriously happy pups.

If the one hadn’t barked or I hadn’t heard them, I am not sure we would ever have found them. I could have walked ten yards away and I would not have seen them. And that’s how the one who barked earned his new Hero Dog tag.

We now have a GPS dog tracking collar on the other, quiet dog in case they ever get out again.

We have a new second-grade teacher hired from another state. She puts up a bulletin board to spotlight student work and to highlight their successes. She’s from Denver, and she titles it with a phrase popular in Colorado.

Later, the administration had to politely ask her not to title her display of classwork “The Mile High Club.”