Our last Airbnb guest has come and gone. Thankfully.
“Just because a guest has all 5 star reviews doesn’t mean they’re a 5 star guest,” I tell Dave, coming to this realization on the second day of the reservation.
I guess they weren’t so bad, except for the constant slamming of the door, two days in a row being awoken at 5AM by some noise they were making, and just general weirdness. The first night Dave woke up because someone (one of our guest’s guests?) was banging on the door. We never really found out why he was doing this, just that he was, and as we are both of the belief that sleep is sacrosanct, we were not delighted. We elected not to say anything yet, though. After all, we don’t want to be too harsh, and it’s probably just a one-off, we said. We’ll get a decent night’s sleep tonight and all will be fine, we said.
I woke up the next morning to a car alarm going off. “Buh?” I said, my brain not awake enough to form coherent words or thoughts. After a minute, I realized that there was a car alarm going off in our driveway, and that it was not supposed to be going off. It was still dark, so it was pretty early, and that meant…
“Bruh,” I said, and got out of bed. By this time the alarm had been going off for a solid two minutes. I could hear Dave going downstairs, no doubt with the same expression on his face that was on mine – disbelieving offense that this was happening. Again. The car alarm shut off almost as soon as I heard Dave open the front door. I checked the time – 4:50 AM.
Dave came back upstairs and made his report: as soon as he got out there the car alarm was turned off. He couldn’t find anyone around, so decided to just come back upstairs. Later in the morning we sent our guest a message that said “you guys need to be quiet during quiet time” except phrased nicer. Our guest responded with profuse apologies, and we were able to sleep that night.
The next morning, our guest sent a message that she was checking out a day early. We looked at each other, then shrugged.
“I’m sorry we enforced the rules?” I said.
“Sorry your stay was hampered by us not being cool with you waking up the whole neighborhood?” Dave said.
I have been waiting for the review: “Host chastised us for not following the house rules. Honestly upset they even had rules. 1 star” but so far nothing, which is fine with me. The review window is not closed yet, though, so we’ll see.
We have another guest who is just checking in today, and Juan seems chill from what Dave said, so hopefully the next week will be nice and smooth.
In non-Airbnb related news, our raspberry bushes are still going strong. I bought the salsa ingredients that I didn’t already have, so all I have to do is go pick some more berries. I have not yet created a robot to pick them for me, and Theodore has resisted all attempts to train him to pick berries, so manual labor it is.
Speaking of Theodore, we have come to the conclusion that this man does not know how to cat. There’s a baby rabbit that’s come to hang out in the yard, and Theodore just hangs out on the front porch and ignores it, instead of doing the whole cat thing of stalking it and then toying with it. No, just chilling near it. He doesn’t even hunt birds. He just looks at them, then goes back to not doing anything about them. We occasionally entertain the hope that we can do something to teach him how to cat, but I’m not sure this is viable. Anytime we try to get him to do anything he just looks at us, gives us a face that says “Nah” and then goes back to ignoring us. The man is untrainable.
We had about a week of summer, then skipped directly to Hell’s Front Porch. What do you mean it isn’t officially summer yet? Did we skip summer entirely and go straight to Hell’s Front Porch? I feel cheated. This is what comes from living in Missouri. We’re almost five years in, you’d think I’d be used to it by now.
The Bear and the Cat 