Dog and House sitters.

As we are off in a few weeks, it was time to bite then bullet and find people to love Dog while we are away and this time we wanted people to stay in the house, so Dog is in her own environment.

Last time was a nightmare. I found a family on Gumtree and we met them and were ok with leaving Dog there. We parted with large chunks of wonga and even though they had pulled a last minute swifty with an address change, we dropped off our lovely girl, only to be devastated by a whole bunch of crazy mean nastiness topped with a good dollop of greed and fraud, all delivered via text in the middle of the night to my London bed.

Thank heavens for Nikki and Susan and Yorke, who stepped up and rescued our girl and loved her til we got back. This rescue might well have been one of the kindest gestures I have every witnessed. 6 months is a long time to love another's dog and then hand her back but that's exactly what happened. And in the mean time we had fraudsters renting the big house treating it like shit and finally as they were moving out they nicked stuff and patchworked the colours on the walls. That little drama took months for the courts to sort.

So it's been 3 years since we needed someone else to love Dog.

We were nervous. We wanted people to move into the house and be home most of the time to just cuddle and love her.

We joined a House sitters site and I sent out invitations to various people - mostly retired couples who sounded like they'd be good.

We were being fussy, but after the debacle last time I don't reckon anyone would blame us.

And we stumbled upon John and Jan who were gonna be at the Goldie for a few months helping out their daughter and the more we heard the more the whole thing sounded perfect. We chatted and agreed. The whole arrangement is a fingers crossed barter - they pay no rent and they don't charge us for caring for Dog and the house is occupied. Winner winner chicken dinners all round.

We met the J's today and reckon we are all a good match. They played with Dog and seemed to be instantly drawn to her - how could any normal person not be? Yeh I know some people are not doggie folk but if they were pretending then they did a damn fine job of it.

I mean how unlucky would we need to be to be on the shit end of a swindle 2 out of 2 times?  

Fingers crossed we get home to a happy dog and a house full of furniture.