Paula Light’s The Monday Peeve is all about a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week.

My peeve today is about Christmas trees. No, I don’t have anything against Christmas trees, but I do have an issue with their disposal. Where I live, the refuse company sends out notices to its customers regarding the collection of Christmas trees.Notice the bold text in the above message. It reminds people to put their trees out on the night before their scheduled compost collection and to place them next to their compost bins.

The compost in our neighborhood is collected on Wednesdays. Since this Wednesday is the first non-holiday Wednesday since Christmas, this coming Tuesday night is when people are supposed to put out their trees for pick up the next morning. And yet, since a few days after Christmas, people have been hauling their trees out to the curb and leaving them there willy-nilly.What’s the big deal, you ask? We walk our dog along these streets each day (and night) and she feels compelled to stop at each and every discarded tree to sniff and often to pee on them. And because there are so many, it adds considerably to the time it takes for her to make the rounds.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t complain. Our dog is 14 and I don’t how much more time she has left. She seems to enjoy stopping, sniffing, and, yes, urinating, on all these discarded Christmas trees, so as much as it pisses me off that people don’t do what they’re supposed to do, I want our old dog to get whatever gives her pleasure for however much longer she has.