Monday, March 18, 2013

Drawing The Line

A dog threw up in my bed last night and I was totally unaware. I slept through it and only found it when I was making the bed. I slept hard. I am usually a light sleeper and will wake at the slightest noise .... or smell. I must have been really tired.
 
As hard as I slept, I still wanted to sleep more, rather than get up this morning. I am always afraid to deviate from my normal sleep pattern. I think it will keep me from sleeping. Silly, since there are so many nights I lay awake in spite of my efforts to maintain a regular sleep pattern.

Along with the weather, my internet service seems to have gone haywire for the past two weeks. I tried to post several times and was unsuccessful. I could get on-line intermittently. I could read posts from my blog roll, but couldn't post a comment. Same with my e-mail, so I knew it wasn't Blogger. He Who is supposed to fix things for me had the same problem. I don't really want to know what the problem was, just fix it!

I didn't get to present my thoughts to my friend, Insomnia, last night. From time to time, as proprietors of a campground, we have been approached by those who have found themselves in dire circumstances, having nowhere to live. It would seem to be a simple decision to help people by offering them shelter. It is not simple at all.

In the current economy, I am surprised we are not approached more frequently and seeing someone that has lost everything they have tugs at your heart. That being said, there are so many things to consider. In order to attract families to my park, I have to maintain a certain atmosphere. The appearance of homesteaders in tents is not conducive to attracting paying customers. On the other hand, how do you turn people away?

We have helped people and been rewarded with wonderful experiences. Our lives have been enriched by some of the folks we have encountered. We have had as many bad experiences and we have had good, though. It would seem to be impossible to determine which experience awaits you, though.

There is no lack of those eager to tell you how you should run your business. No matter what policy you choose to embrace, there will always be someone who disagrees.

Where do you draw the line?

10 comments:

Brian Miller said...

smiles...you take the good with the bad...and the not knowing is all part of the adventure...i did not want to get up this morning either...ugh...ha...luckily no barf on my end...smiles.

Val said...

We used to have rental property. Hick rented to a guy with no job, in spite of my wishes to rent the unit to a college girl. Her parents would have paid, you know. Instead, we had this dude with a wife and two kids who never paid after the deposit and first month's rent.

We gave them stacks of Genius's outgrown baby clothes. For thanks, they trashed the place and lived rent-free while we waited on the legal process to get them out.

That's where I draw the line. Being penniless does not give you the right to destroy your free living space.

The guy we bought the duplex from said he used to take the front door off the hinges. "And those SOBs STILL lived there until I hauled their stuff out to my property on a trailer. I left a note where they could find it, but they never showed up."

Some people you can help, some you can't. You don't know until it's too late.

luksky said...

I wondered where you had been. When we first moved to Texas we lived in a hotel for a couple of months until we found a home. One morning my daughter woke up in the small co-bed we all slept in and said I feel something weird at my feet underneath the covers. I pulled the covers back only to discover a pile of puke my little chihuahua had left during the night. I'm sure the hotel maids really loved cleaning those sheets!!! I did leave a hefty tip for their troubles though.

joanne said...

I draw the line at sleeping in dog/cat puke..

mamahasspoken said...

What Joanne said ;o)
But I think in the end it's what you feel is the best. At the end of the day, if you went to bed with no regrets for helping someone out then humanity is better for it.
That's a good thing.

Kathy G said...

What a way to wake up!

Erik's RV Blog said...

It's always so easy to be an armchair quarterback. I honestly don't have an answer, not for the lack of sleep since I suffer the from the same problem and I don't have an answer for people needing a place to stay...

I'm no help at all here... parts of my family have soaked me dry and I keep helping so I would probably be bad at running a campground..

I do wish you luck in both though! :)

Erik

Linda O'Connell said...

Dog puke in bed, bad customers... one is as bad as the other. Everyone wants to express an opinion!You go where your heart leads you, in my case.

Unknown said...

What's a sleep pattern?

Unknown said...

Since my eyes started getting bad, I have stopped trying to fight with the word verification spam filter thingy. Furthermore, I have stopped including sites with it engaged in my Sites To See and A Sunday Drives series. Since the word verification thingy does not always rear its ugly head until after one leaves a comment, it is necessary to leave a prior comment before including a site, and yours is the first one among those that were included in the Sites To See for 02/29/2012 that did not have that abomination in place. THANK YOU!