Adventures In House Sitting

I've been house sitting for M&L about twice a year for five or six years now.  When mom and I moved out of the house I grew up in, the day after we moved into her new house, I left to house sit for ten days.  When I got home, she had unpacked all of the common areas and to this day, there are certain things that for the life of me, I can't figure out what she did with.  Because of this we used to joke that I knew how to find things in M&L's kitchen that I couldn't find in my own.

In the past, there has always been at least one dog with me, if not three.  This is the first time I've house sat for them without any pets in the house and it is a little weird not to have any little buddies depending on me or keeping me company.

One of the great things about house sitting is that at home I have a shower but no tub, while M&L have two glorious tubs which I get all to myself.  Yeah, go ahead and laugh, but sometimes there is nothing quite like a good soak to soothe away your aches and pains and fatigue.  In the past, there have been several baths that got cut short because I could hear a dog whining to be let out.  Sara was pretty old, so you couldn't really ignore such a request for long.

The other day, I was having a relaxing soak, when what did I hear?  Something that sounded very much like a dog whining.  Problem was, there were no dogs in the house.  I listened for a while and heard the sound again.  It was not coming from outside, and some deductive reasoning told me that barring the presence of ghostly puppies, the sound was coming from inside the walls.  As it turns out, the pipes to that part of the house can sound eerily similar to a small dog whining.

Once I stopped laughing at myself, I realized the impact those whining pipes must have had on me: I weep at the thought of all of those glorius baths that got cut short due to false alarms!