Pets vs. the pavement

Dear Heloise: With warmer weather comes hot sidewalks and streets. This means it’s better to walk your dogs and other pets later in the day around 8 or 9 p.m. The heat of the pavement and blacktop roads will have started to cool off by then and shouldn’t harm your pet’s paws. You also can walk a pet early in the morning when it’s still not so hot that it’ll burn their paws.

If you are walking a pet later in the day, wear reflective gear so cars avoid you and your pet. Dogs and cats should have reflective collars on. If you don’t happen to have anything reflective, wear something white that can easily be picked up in a car’s headlights. — Rose Ann D., Houston, Texas

A tidy home

Dear Heloise: I have 10 children and a seven-bedroom house to keep clean. That means everyone gets trained early in life. The messiest parts of many homes are usually the bathrooms, and we have three and a half baths to keep clean. Here are the rules in our house to keep the bathrooms organized, and all 10 kids follow them:

1. Leave nothing on the floor. Everyone must hang up their towels and clothes

2. If you used it, you put the cap back on, wipe down the countertop and put things back where you got them.

3. To make things easier, everyone is assigned a bathroom he or she is responsible for keeping nice and clean. There are three “teams,” and the winning team on Saturday morning gets to pick out a movie we watch, the flavor of ice cream we buy or something else as a reward. — Nadine J., New Castle, Pennsylvania

Nadine, you’ve worked out a terrific system to teach your children responsibility, teamwork and how to main- tain a home. Well done! — Heloise

Microchipped

Dear Heloise: We recently lost our pet Yorkie, who man- aged to dig his way under the fence. Thankfully he was microchipped, and we got him back. But our vet told us that hundreds of dogs and cats are not returned to their owners because they don’t have a microchip. Col- lars can get lost or ripped off in a fight, but shelters check for those chips. You stand a better chance of get- ting your pet back if they are chipped. — Dorie B., Rut- land, Vermont

Scam alert

Dear Heloise: Yester- day, I received a phone call from a young man claiming there was a warrant out for my arrest for two unpaid parking tickets. I was puz- zled because I know I have never had a parking ticket. He said I could pay by phone and the warrant would be dropped. My son was here and took over the call. There was a heated exchange, and my son hung up the phone because it was a scam. The person calling wanted my bank account number. Need- less to say, the caller got noth- ing. Please tell your readers not to panic when or if they get a call like that, because it’s a scammer hunting for your financial information. Just hang up on them. — Glo- ria S., Portland, Oregon