House-Sitting 101: One Excuse As To Why I Haven't Been Posting On Steemit As Much As I Usually Try, But Often Don't Get Done, Lately ~ A Non-Short Thing In One Part ~

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A Home Away From Home

I haven't been posting as much as I would like lately, and one excuse I'm going to toss out here is that I have been house-sitting for some friends this past week.

Ah Yes. The fine art of house-sitting. Some folks enjoy this endeavor. Others not so much. I actually tumble off the peak of the roof towards that first category. House sitting to me is sort of like going to a motel, in your own home-town. Think of it as a mini-vacation, away from the house, with the added option of driving back home anytime you want. Say...if you forgot some sort of 'necessity' for the stay. Or maybe you're unsure whether or not you left the gas nozzle on back at the house. A mini vacation, with all the home-body perks attached. And a whole lot more fun than staying at those standard cookie-cutter, boxy-motel things.

Open The Windows, and Turn That Damn Thing Down!

Oh the joys of the standard motel. Extraneous TV noise from channels you don't particularly want to watch, blaring at all hours through the too-thin walls and cheesy plastic wallpaper of your room. Or worse, other 'late night human sounds of enjoyment' mixing with the extraneous TV noise coming through the too-thin walls and paper of your room at all hours.

I always feel like an intruder during these bed-spring dalliances from beyond the headboard. Being a card-carrying member of the Eggshell Family, I often feel like I should wait out in the hall, or go hang out in the ice-machine room, whenever the folks next door begin to noisily test out their bed springs with all sorts of bedroom calisthenics.

And let's not forget the other joys of a motel stay. All that overly-dry and stale-as-oven-toast, un-breathable air in the motel room. The nasty atmosphere that can't be fixed, because the windows don't even open. Why ARE these things still called 'windows'?

The motel industry really should re-name them in their construction design specs. "A more realistic description, please!" Something like 'transparent wall parts', or 'small, see-through wall panels'. A window is a...WINDOW!. It opens up. To the outdoors.

Let's just call them what they truly are, or better yet, make some design changes so they actually DO open. So we can get some of that precious outdoor air flowing into the indoors room we're sitting in. (You can tell I'm rather adamant about these dumb 'windows'.)

And the final, most joyous part of a motel stay? Those ultra-nice motel sheets/pillows/blankets/mattresses that 400,000 other people have slept in and on during the last umpteen years. The bedding you just aren't all that familiar with, that mentally or physically keeps you from having a nice, restful night of...rest.

On To House Sitting, Please

OK, where was I? House sitting at another person's house. The extremely close, local motel. The place where the windows DO open, and there are no wild rumpus parties going on in the next room. Just the other small joys of the house-sitting experience one must deal with. The process I like to call the Initial Discovery Stage, or "Where The Heck IS Everything I Need" for short.

Trying to figure out the existence of everything in the house that you need to know and subsequently use to live a daily life. What buttons/levers/knobs/switches/faucets/plugs/receptacles/cupboards/dishes/bowls/silverware/doors/locks/appliances/tools/brooms/garbage cans and other things you need to locate and understand to make it all work like a daily, live-in house.

This process does have an end, but can take awhile to work through. Where's the cookware? Are there any pens in this house? Don't these people use rubber spatulas? How long do I have to pull up and hold the little shower knob-thingy, before the water actually comes out from above? And where the heck does the cat always hide, when I think it might have errant-ly run outdoors when I came in the front door? All the normal process-things of life that you have down-pat at home, that now must be re-learned in a new domicile. Always a bit of a mild adventure. Except the missing cat part.

But Do They Get Portandia On The Box?

Luckily, there are often a few big positives to balance out these small, house-sitting annoyances. Like a large-screen TV, and that ever-precious media cord that connects it to the wall, and subsequent outside world. In this most recent case of house sitting, the owners had cable TV (which I do not), and they had Netflix (which I do not, also). A very fine perk of sitting at their house, offering up huge potential for accomplishing very little of anything on a daily basis.

The good, the bad, the TV, all blended together into one visuo-auditory cauldron of endless entertainment. Hours and hours and hours of episodes of Portlandia, Breaking Bad, Comedy Central, or Major movies I missed at the theater because I was too busy writing posts for Steemit. A joyously simple and endless stream of mind-numbing distractions normally un-available to me, all now contained in one small, AAA operated remote control device.

But Wasn't There A Dog Or Cat To Take Care Of?

Yes, I'm so glad you asked. There was a dog. And a cat. The dog was a pretty normal dog, as dogs go. The cat...I re-named 'Bonkers'...so that should give you a small clue as to it's nature of behavior. It was a very sweet cat, just spent most of it's time running all around at full speed, hitting the throw rugs on the hardwood floor and sledding about, or knocking the pillows off the couch, then attacking and attempting to disembowel them of their fat little polyester stuffin's. Such fun was had by all.

Now and then 'Bonkers' would look back and forth really fast, like someone was talking to her, then do that sideways kitty run/hop thing with her back arched way up in the air. Reminded me of those crazy cats you see on old Saturday morning cartoons. All the while bouncing across the floor sideways. I'm pretty sure the cat was constantly seeing things that either I couldn't see, or that just weren't really there.

I never DID figure out what this was all about. But it is a bit spooky at night...sitting on the couch reading by one lamp...and the cat walks in, then suddenly looks into the darkened corner of the room, head zipping back and forth really fast, then does that odd little sideways dance across the floor, and runs off to the back of the house.

"Stop Doing That"!! Really gave me the willies now and then.

The Kitty Decides To Climb Mt. Venetian

But the MOST fun kitty activity, and the thing I most -- least wanted to explain to the 'owners' once they got home, was the Bird-Feeder/Exploding Window Blind game the cat enjoyed playing on a way-too-often basis. There was a hanging bird feeder, just outside the front window of the house that was often visited by the local avian clientele. Evidently Bonkers really likes birds.

One day, when coming up the walk to open the front door, I heard a 'KLL-LONKK' coming from the house, and looked up, just in time to see the cat exploding through the Venetian blinds hanging in the front window. The goofy cat must have taken a full-on run and leap, latched itself to the closed blind, and was now burrowing and chewing it's way through the 'Venetian' part, to get to a bird on the feeder that was now long gone. The cat hung on the louvers and strings of the blind as long as it could, before dropping back down out of view from my out-front location.

When I finally got in the front door, the cat was sitting all mellow-like on the window ledge below the blinds, non-nonchalantly staring at me as if to say "Whaaat", then jumped down and ran off with that odd, sideways bunny-hop-bounce thing all the way to the back of the house and out of sight.

I tried everything to alleviate future kitty damage to the blinds. Pulling the blinds up. Putting them all the way down. Piling stuff in the way. Long discussions with kitty. Whatever might work to keep things at destruction-bay. But in the end, nothing I did kept the cat from tearing the blinds to shreds. (I couldn't take them down, they were attached).

By the time my friends returned home, the Venetian's were hanging all katty-wampus with the long strings still holding them together pretty much shredded and worthless. So much for me being a model house-sitter. The homeowners didn't seem all that upset by this new development when they returned, even commenting in a nice tone, "Oh, she does that sometimes." So I guess I wasn't in all that much trouble after all.

The Dog and I Hatch A Simple Plan

The dog? She was a really nice dog. Very mellow, except when doing those rapid spin-things whenever it was time to do something fun. I'm sure you've all seen this activity now and then in Dogland. Staying in one place, twirling in circles with that enormous tongue flopping all about the entire time. Stopping now and then, head down, butt up in the air, making odd dog noises, then starting all over again. I'm pretty sure there is no other expression of happiness in the entire world quite like the un-bridled, 'want to go for a walk?, doggy joy these wonderful creatures exhibit.

Yes, we got along brilliantly, and together we took quite a few 'sniffs' around the neighborhood for a bit of exercise. Some people call these things walks, but in my experience, we often spend more time smelling bushes, rocks and lampposts than efficiently getting anywhere. I guess that is another one of the purely simple, joyous activities of being a dog. Schnuffling about to see 'who' has wandered on by before.

The only complaint I have about the dog, was that she is possessed of way too much integrity. No matter HOW hard I tried, I could not convince her to come up with any minor ailments we could use as an excuse to make a trip to the Veterinarian. In hind-sight, I think she just disagreed with my plan, most likely on principle.

My friends had placed a credit card account at the Vets, to use in case of pet emergencies, so I would not have to pay for any of these sorts of expensive needs. And needs...well... I figured they come in all sizes, packages and toppings. The plan was to take the dog in for some simple thing or another, get the credit card number from the Vet, head back to the house, and I'd be set for free pizza's from Domino's for the next week and a half of mindless, re-run TV and endless movies on Netflix. (My friends DID tell me, be before they left on their trip, "eat whatever you want".)

Brilliant plan on paper, but somehow the puppy just didn't see it that way. Which, from the standpoint of the dog's health, as well as a future explanation to my friends about 'some bill' a month later, was probably a better idea to forgo in the end.

And as such...another simple plan was then hatched and followed. I was reduced to making way-too-many of my own homemade pizzas over the next week or so, to consume while watching endless entertainment hours on the TV. Only one problem arose during this time, and though I asked repeatedly, the cat and dog were of absolutely no help at all: "How DOES this fancy, newfangled push-button oven work, anyway?"

I'm happy to report that I finally figured it all out, and that I'm still very good friends with both the dog and the nutty cat.

~ Finto ~

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The Dog. Staring at me as we discuss how to work the fancy-schmancy oven.

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