The first pet peeve that came to mind was when I walk in the city and I find blue elastics laying on the streets I walk. I can’t prove it but I believe they are elastics postal carriers have around bundles of letters. I think they are carelessly dropped. It is littering and it irritates me.
I keep meaning to phone Canada Post to check it out and put in a complaint if it is true that I am correct in what is happening. So a pet peeve is that I have done nothing. I don’t even pick the elastics up. That is a pet peeve as well.
As I write this, it occurs to me that the major factor in my decision not to pick the elastic is because of someone’s reaction to my picking up a discarded pony tail holder on one of our walks. Someone who was seven years old at the time.
He was horrified that I would pick it up and that I said there wouldn’t be anything wrong with using it; that the thirty plus degree summer temperature or the forty below winter temperature would sterilize any issue it might have.
He was not appeased. He imagined lice and nits and demonstrated such disgust by looks and voice. It changed my habit of picking up every piece of garbage and thinking I needed to find a use for it; the saving of our planet time of my life.
I still believe in caring for our planet and I’ve decided based on the writing of this, I will pick up the next blue elastic and I’m imagining a chain of elastics I can make out of these discarded items. Someone else may be able to contribute the next phase of the elastics life. I can be the person who picks them off the street and they will no longer be the subject of a pet peeve.
ellensagh 