Scared Dogs And Data Plans

Summer is here.  And with Summer comes the thunderstorms.  And with thunderstorms comes a frightened Faithful Pup Scout.  And with a frightened Faithful Pup Scout comes a sleepless night for me.  And when I have a sleepless night, I'm pretty miserable.  Hence, with Summer comes misery.

I get that we can be scared of things that we don't understand.  Faithful Pup Scout, as a dog, obviously doesn't understand a lot of things, the weather being one of these.  Not only does she seem to hate thunder and lightning, but she hates just plain rain.  She is such a delicate little prissy dog that she can't stand to get her feet wet.  She refuses to go outside to do her business when it's raining, which just adds to the issues in the middle of the night when she can't sleep because of thunder and lightning, and has to do her business, but won't go outside because of the rain, and barks at me as if I can do something about the weather.  Dogs aren't very smart.

Tonight started out kind of bad, with the distant sound of thunder.  I tried to do some advance planning by taking Faithful Pup Scout outside to do her business before the storm arrived.  She was good to go, so to speak, until she heard the thunder for herself.  Now, her hearing is not what it used to be, so I don't know how she could hear the thunder, as distant as it was, but she did. She cut short her outside trip and came back in without doing everything she had to do.  Now she's got me nervous that she's going to have to go when the rain arrives, and she's not going to want to go outside at that point.

Sure enough, the rains started and we had a pretty significant boomer pass through.  Fortunately, the storms may be done.  The radar is looking good.  But any more thunderstorms tonight are going to be misery for me.  Dumb dog.

***

My daughter's phone stopped working a few weeks ago, so we went to the local cell phone store to see what could be done.  I pay for the maintenance plan, so we're entitled to a new phone if this one is broken beyond repair.  Well, it was broken beyond repair.  The phone no longer charges, so it can't be fixed.  We received clarification on the maintenance plan, as well.  We don't get a NEW phone.... we get a "refurbished" phone.  So the very helpful cell phone guy explained how we could get a new phone by adding another line, and yadda yadda yadda, my daughter has a brand new phone, much nicer and newer than my own.  In addition, the cell phone guy took a look at our account and told me he could save us even more money by changing us to a data plan that better fits our actual usage.  This sounded good in theory.  He said we could go to the next level down since we don't use that much data, and save about 20 bucks a month.  I said sign us up!

So here we are, about two weeks later, and my daughter has already used up the data allotted to her.  This happened in part because it's a brand new phone, with more memory, and she's using it a whole lot more.  Okay, I'll give her that.  But since she's away from home all this week, and isn't able to connect to our wi-fi (which doesn't count against our data allowance), she's already used it up.  This is also a result of the fact that I wouldn't allow her to take her laptop with her to Grandma and Grandaddy's.  If she was using her laptop, she wouldn't be using her phone nearly as much.  So, according to my daughter, this is all my fault.

At least she'll be home in two short days.  I wonder if I can get a two-day data plan?

Have a great evening, everyone!