The House Sitting Trip from Hell

Pardon the title but I'm sure that you'll understand once you hear the entire story. :-)

It was just 9 days of house sitting, nothing I hadn't done before. It was a pretty easy job. Feed the dog, walk the dog, water the plants, get the mail and have a house all to myself for just over a week. No problem. Unfortunately I was so very wrong.

When my sister and I came back to the house on the first night the dog was gone. She usually sticks around the yard and comes running when you pull up, but Zoey wasn't there. My sister and I walked around the neighborhood but didn't see her anywhere. When we got back there was a message on the machine from a neighbor saying that they had the dog and that she was going crazy and wouldn't leave their yard. So we went up and picked her up and took her home. By this time it was rainy and windy. We were prepared for a power outage or some flickering but we were not prepared for the nightmare which lay ahead of us.

The power went out in the middle of the night, but luckily we set an alarm on my cell phone so we got up for seminary. We decided to go, because sometimes only some people loose power so there probably would be seminary. As we left Rachel locked the door and shut it. A reasonable act, right? No. She locked the lock that we had no key to. Now under normal circumstances, this would be no problem. We'd just have to us the garage code and get in through there, but the power was out so no garage. We decided to deal with it later. Somehow.

Rachel and I made out way out of the driveway and proceeded to the main road. Soon we were met with an obstacle. Trees and power lines down across the only road out. Considering we hadn't missed a day of seminary yet, we weren't going to let a measly tree or power line keep up. Perhaps we were a little overzealous, but hey Zimmerman's go to seminary. Period. We managed to maneuver around the trees without getting killed and headed over to make our carpool stop. We swerved around fallen trees and only came upon a couple of power lines. All the lights were out as usual at Scott’s house, but we knocked and lights came on and he was out in 5ish minutes. So the three of us headed towards the church building. Luckily by then we had made it to the main roads. We pulled up to seminary and of course no one was there. So we headed back to the house trying to figure out a way to break in.

All the doors were locked so our carpoolee suggested we try the windows. He claimed to have had experience breaking into houses. So it was lucky we had picked him up. We found a window in the living room that wasn't locked. So we popped out the screen and climbed through. It was quite an eventful morning. I took Rachel to school, but I was out for the quarter so I went back to the house to spend the day without electricity.

Usually the power comes back on in a day or so. The next day the power was still out and I started to worry about all the food in their fridge and freezer. I peeked out in their garage and they had a generator. So my Daddy came over and got it running for me. We wired up the house so that we were just powering the essentials. With extension cords running through the main rooms we had the fridge, freezer, and TV running. No heat. Just a couple lights.

Now I've never been good at lighting fires. I just can't seem to get them to work. I think I’m doing it right then in a couple of minutes it’s struggling for life. Perhaps I just need to resort to lighter fluid or presto logs. Needless to say we were FREEZING! Rachel and I slept out in the living room, huddled out near the fireplace with as many blankets as we could find. Later we found out that we were pulling wood from the wet end of the wood pile. Perhaps that explains some of the difficultly we had in lighting and keeping a fire going.

One of the mornings I woke up to find neon green dog vomit on the carpet in the living room. I apparently had slept through the dogs whining and failed to let her out. I have never anything that color come out of an animal before. I hope I never will again.

After a couple days the generator began to be temperamental. No longer did it want to run. The start up switch started sparking and it made this terrible noise. Somehow I had managed to break their generator. By this time the power had come back on at my house so we loaded up their food and took a load over to our house. That night more than anything I wanted to call it quits. At that point I guess it was all downhill. There wasn’t much more that could go wrong.

The day the family was set to come home a miracle happened. The power came back on. After 9 days of no power, of trying to work a generator, of trying to build a fire, of trying to stay warm, of cleaning up technicolor dog vomit, of trying to sound cool and collected when the family called to check up on everything, the power was back on. I vacuumed, removed the webs of extension cords, put all the half burnt wood in a bag and took it home (so as to remove the evidence of my many failed fire attempts), scrubbed the carpet, packed my stuff and wrote a multi page note to the family explaining all that had transpired. Perhaps it’s my aversion to confrontation that pushed me to write it all down rather than tell it to them to their face. The thought of telling them of the travesties that had occurred made me sick to my stomach. It seemed I had done everything wrong except burn the house down.

Thus ended my house sitting trip from hell. Reading over this blog now I can laugh about it because it has been a few years but I don’t think I’ll ever forget that week of horrors.