House Sitting

Mary* asked me to look after the dogs, cats, and fish while she elected to take some time to let her broken wrist do some healing, and went to visit her brother. Since it was only for a few days, my job was basically to make sure the dogs didn’t kill each other (or run away), and the other animals were fed. It’s good that I like animals.

Friday night was the toughest as I need to work on Saturday. Unfortunately, the Siberian Husky puppy can be a little needy, and insisted on waking me at 1:30am with a face-lick-shower that wouldn’t be appeased until she got a minute of petting. All was quiet until about 3:00am. I heard one of the cats walking somewhere near my head (they may be quiet, but not that quiet). Seems that 3:00am is the perfect time to spend some time in a nice warm lap. In and of itself, I wouldn’t have minded except that it chose to treat my hand and fingers as a really cool cat toy. Needless to say, I didn’t get a ton of sleep. Thank goodness it was a little slow at work.

Knowing the routine, Saturday night was better. Yes, the puppy again needed attention, and the cat sought warmth, but as I was expecting it, I barely roused enough to notice. The rest of the weekend was pretty calm. I engaged in some leash practice with the dogs, and let the cats romp about outside for a while. The only glitch was one of the cats had been left locked in a room accidentally, and I didn’t suspect that until over a day had passed. When I got off work and stopped by the house, the cat was meowing for attention, but after some food and a good ten minutes of stroking, I think I was forgiven.

All in all, not a bad way to spend some time. Unfortunately, it did delay some web work I wanted to finish up, but that will take care of itself. I did have some relatives come from out of town to visit on Saturday, and between work and the animals, I didn’t really have more than a few minutes to visit, but they’ll be ’round again, so I’m not to broken up about that. Though I had to juggle my schedule a bit to make sure all the important things got tended to, I also did get some much needed quiet time. Sometimes that’s the best medicine of all (though the animals helped :-) ).