House Sitting: Did I Mention There Was an English Bull Dog Involved?

I thought I had posted this little adventure on Clanging Bell previously, but when looking for it to send the link to someone, I couldn't find it in the archives. So, I decided to take the chance some of you hadn't read it and posted it. It took place 10-or-so years ago. What follows is all true.

This is a cautionary tale about what can happen when you lack the good sense to avoid talking about house/dog sitting for friends after several beers, a half dozen glasses of wine and a shot of Don Julio. As a guy, I should have more respect for the power of alcohol and its ability to soften one’s inhibitions and crumble one’s capacity to just say, no. I broke down the defenses of many a young lady using alcohol over the years. Now I can’t find a woman who can consume enough alcohol for that strategy to work, but that’s another story for another time.

The friends in question are Karen and John. The house in question is on Lake Norman in North Carolina. And the dog in question is a 100+-pound English Bull Dog named Tully. The occasion was a 10-day May vacation to Italy to celebrate John’s 50^th birthday. Although there are neighbors who have and who are willing to drop by the house, feed Tully and even take him for walks, Karen and John didn’t want him left alone for that length of time. Evidently they had worked their way through both sides of the family without securing a willing volunteer. During an overnight trip to my house in early January, and after a 5-hour afternoon saloon slog through downtown Greenville and several glasses of wine at Peddler Steak House at dinner, they posed the dog-sitting request to me. I eagerly shouted, “Yes. Sure. Why not? Sounds like fun. Count me in. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” At least that’s how I suspect I answered.

It was nothing more than a very fuzzy memory that I had to be prodded to recall at all when a month later I was at their house for the Super Bowl, and John asked if I was still willing to baby sit Tully in May. Baby sit? Tully? May? It just didn’t ring a bell. After pondering it for a few seconds, I managed to dredge up a faint recollection of the conversation. Having acquiesced to the Tully-babysitting request doesn’t rank up there with losing your car or waking up next to a carnival freak whose name you just can’t place, but it’s still one of those what-was-I-thinking experiences that all too often seem to be related to binge drinking. (Sometimes I even drink enough to, gasp, dance in public.)

The die was cast, as they say, and it was time for some damage control. I certainly didn’t want them to think I am not a man of my word. I already have a grocery list of creditors who think that. “Ah, what are those dates again?” I stammered. It was May 14 through the 24^th. Rolling my eyes up into my head, I concentrated for a couple of minutes trying to remember some pressing commitment I had during that time frame. Nothing! Dammit! There I was caught on the horns of a dilemma, sporting a little pre-Super Bowl buzz, and lacking the capacity to come up with a plausible excuse for reversing my original answer. The snake alcohol reared its ugly head again. I’ve got to stop drinking.

Like a desperate shipwreck victim awash at sea, I grasped for the only chunk of flotsam within my short reach: “No problem,” I assured him. “As long as I don’t come up with a job between now and then, I’m good to go.” It wasn’t much, but it was something. It could happen. People are hired all of the time – just not me. I’d have a better chance of winning Power Ball or getting struck by lightening than getting a nine-to-five job during the intervening three months or the next ten years for that matter. John didn’t appear worried.

As the appointed dates persistently drew closer, events that could have saved my bacon had they materialized six weeks or two months earlier began to present themselves. First there was the Kenny Chesney concert in Greenville on the 21^st. Learning of this performance, I e-mailed Karen and told her she needed to find someone to spell me the afternoon of the 21^st and morning of the 22^nd because I was going to be in Row F, Section 230, Seat 1 at the Bi-Lo Center for that concert. She understood because she and I had discussed going to see him if he played a concert in our area. “I’ll be back in time to handle the Friday late afternoon schedule,” I told her.

A week later my Illinois buddy Joni called to say she and her pal Lynn would be enjoying their annual week in Hilton Head on May 16 through the 22 and wanted to come visit me on their way home on the 23^rd. This inspired another e-mail to Karen. I told her I needed to leave again on Saturday morning and could she possibly find someone to handle Saturday afternoon and Sunday. Again, she said, no problem. She had found the adult son of a friend who loves English Bull Dogs (Of course at this point he hadn’t spent any real time with Tully.) and had offered to take care of Tully any time. He would assume Tully duties on Thursday morning for the balance of their trip. Hallelujah! Other things came up as well, such as a 2-day Hyundai event on the 18^th and 19^th, but I just didn’t have the heart to try to reduce my sentence further.

I arrived at Karen and John’s house at 11 AM on the 14^th. My replacement and I were scheduled for a Tully tutorial at that appointed time. During the next 45 min not only did we learn the many intricacies of the 3-bedroom, 31/2-bath edifice known as Chez Kewn, like how the universal remotes for the six flat screen TVs work, where the stash of steaks are kept, how to operate John’s ATV, and so forth; but we also received detailed instructions on all things Tully.

Here is a typical day in the life of Tully: At 7:30 AM he arrives bedside whining to get you up and moving. You, of course, are well rested because he has slept in his bed three feet from yours snoring, sputtering, muttering and farting nonstop for six or seven hours. He gets you up at 7:30 AM not to go out – that would be much too much like a normal dog. No, he gets you up so you can feed him stuff. First are his morning pills. This dog takes more vitamins, capsules and supplements than Arnold did when training for Mr. Universe. Most of these have to be wrapped in cheese or he (Tully not Arnold) won’t eat them. Then you give him a little biscuit for being a good boy. Then you put drops in his eyes, so they don’t dry out. He gets another biscuit for being a good boy.

Now it’s time to really feed him. He gets served a cup of dry food in the morning and one in the afternoon. Besides sleeping, this is probably the most normal thing he does during the course of a full day. You pour the cup of food in his dish and simply set the dish on the floor. When he digs in, it sounds like an industrial-strength garbage disposal. It’s a good idea to stand back to prevent getting hit with splashback and to make sure you don’t accidentally fall into his bowl. If you did, you’d be the lead story on the 6 o’clock news in seconds flat.

Usually he is pooped after all of this whining and eating. He’ll lie down and nap for an hour or so. I doubt that he has figured out that this gives you time to make coffee, go to the bathroom, eat some cereal and so forth. I’m sure if he did realize his napping provides some “me” time, he would figure out a way to keep you occupied for that intervening hour or so, too.

Recovered from his early morning routine, Tully is finally ready for his AM constitutional. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just open the door and let him into the fenced-in backyard? Or put a leash on him and walk him down the driveway and around the block? Dream on. No you have to load him into John’s Nissan Titan or ATV and drive him to one of his familiar potty areas. This twice-a-day activity can take 15 min or an hour depending on the spontaneity of his bowels on any given day. For the most part, this activity is consumed with Tully peeing on 15 different objects – trees, shrubs, ferns, sign posts, and the like – or standing pat watching traffic go by. Don’t even dare to think you are in control here. He goes where he wants to go and doesn’t where he doesn’t. If he decides to stand in place for five minutes, you are not going to budge him. If you are lucky, he will find a spot to drop his load. He only did No. 2 once a day while in my care. They were loads of Biblical proportions. After dropping them, he was quite pleased with himself and would prance back to the truck. Built low to the ground, Tully can’t get up into the truck under his own steam. Nope, he puts his front paws into the truck and you have to grab him by his back legs and alley-oop him up into the cab.

Back at the house, Tully gets a biscuit for being a good boy. Then he sits by the refrigerator for his morning ration of ice cubes. He doesn’t like to drink out of a water bowl. I suspect he would if he was thirsty enough, but that’s not his routine. His routine is to be fed 20 or 25 ice cubes after his twice-a-day walks. So you stand by the freezer dropping ice cubes into his mouth one at a time. As he is chewing them up, he is drooling nonstop. So once he has had his fill, there is a puddle of slobber and melted ice that requires mopping up. This is also a convenient time for his daily butt buffing. Yes, you pull on rubber gloves as if you are going to remove a gallbladder; take a baby wipe by its ends; and work it up between his tail and bung. No kidding this is part of the daily routine. He typically sits in the same spot for his butt buffing as he does for his ice cubes. It can create some confusion. I always tried to first feed him ice cubes when he was sitting there. I am the eternal optimist.

With all of his morning activities completed, he is ready to nap for six hours. The temps were fairly cool during my Tully-watch week, so I was able to leave one of the back sliders open giving him free access to the outdoors. So he was able to sleep on a lawn chair by the pool or in one of his many beds scattered around the house. This was the six hours a day when I could get some work done.

Around 4:00 or 4:30 it was time to begin the afternoon Tully routine. Back into the truck for his end-of-day walk. For the first three or four days, I took him for his stand rather than his walk. He would get out of the truck, pee on several things and then stand still for several minutes, while, like a fool, I would call his name, tug on this leash and attempt to cajole him into taking a few steps. No way. He would eventually turn and amble back to the truck. He decided after a few days of this that he would actually do some walking on these little expeditions. But it still wasn’t more than a couple of city blocks.

Back at the house he received a biscuit for being a good boy, and then he’d get his afternoon serving of ice cubes. Sometimes he was so tuckered out from his two-block walk, he would have to lie down to eat his ice. His afternoon pills, wrapped in pieces of Kraft American, would be next followed by his cup of food. Whew, that’s a lot of activity – time for another nap.

Sometime during the end-of-day schedule, he also gets his daily bone. This is the shoulder or hip knuckle from a cow. He gets a fresh one each and every day. He usually chews on it in his bed in the living room, so a towel needs to be laid down to keep all the muck out of his bed. After 20 minutes or so of chewing on it, he is plum worn out and needs to take another nap.

Karen and John recently purchased one of those Tempurpedic mattresses. I wanted to try it out, so I slept in their room. “Slept” would be too strong a term. For the first three nights I tossed and turned in their bed as Tully snored three feet a way. It was like sleeping next to a wood chipper or camping out in a sawmill. The variety of sounds this dog can make in its sleep is nothing short of staggering. It was a relentless sawing racket punctuated by snorts, lip smacks and groans. I may have slept three hours each for the first three nights. After that he decided to sleep in the living room and I actually managed seven or eight hours of sleep a night.

John had assured me that my work would be undisturbed during the day when Tully somehow sleeps for hours on end. For the most part this was true, except for my first full day when he turned into a 100-pound wrecking ball on legs. I spent an hour chasing him around taking things away. Karen had left an 18 pack of beer sitting on the floor in their party room. Hearing some commotion in there, I went in to find Tully with the carton ripped open lapping up beer that he had managed to spill out after biting open one of the cans.

As I was cleaning that up I heard some noise in John’s office and found Tully with a backpack John had left on a chair. He had it by one of the shoulder straps and was dragging it across the floor. I got that away from him. He ran back into the party room and found a 2-foot-long piece of quarter-round molding that he was chewing on. I have no idea where he got it, but I finally got that away from him.

I went back into the office and no more than sat down at the computer when I heard a racket downstairs. I had brought several protein bars with me. They were in a plastic grocery bag on the kitchen counter. Tully, who can barely negotiate a flight of stairs, had dragged the bag off the counter and snatched up one of the bars. Before I could get to him, he swallowed the bar, wrapper and all. He was on his way back for another when I grabbed the bag off the floor. I never saw the wrapper eject from the other end. As far as I know, it’s still moldering in his colon.

On Sunday I didn’t know how I would make it until Thursday. I was like a kid counting down the days until Christmas. Somehow I made it. I handed Tully off to my replacement who stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed as I described Tully’s snoring. As I backed out of their driveway I turned off the car stereo and enjoyed the peace and quiet for a few minutes. No snoring, no whining, no click, click, click of doggy nails on the hardwood floors. Ah, the sweet sound of silence….