During my last two trips to visit the Cheah family, I’ve been exposed to some good dogsitting experiences. Since I’m staying in a no-animals allowed student housing, it’s nice to hangout with other people’s pets once in a while. When I found out that a friend is looking for someone to co-dog-plus-house-sit with her. Her advisor will be away and needed someone to take care of the two dogs but my friend couldn’t stay the entire duration, so I agreed to help out for a few days.

I thought it would be a nice de-stressing vacation, in addition, the prof’s house is considerably nearer to the Korean grocery store and the nice chinese buffet.

For several days prior to my dogsitting commitment, I thought I would not be able to make it because my car was in the garage. Thankfully the car was ready on time.

From Harleysville

From Harleysville

On Sunday (Dec 28, 08), I made the almost an hour drive to the prof’s house, which was in the middle of nowhere. After checking in on the dogs, I drove to the chinese buffet for lunch.

From Good Food: Bad Photos

From Good Food: Bad Photos

From Good Food: Bad Photos

The food was good, unfortunately they didn’t serve the black bean mussels and cheese-baked mussels, which were the two items I was really looking forward to.

From Harleysville

From Harleysville

The dogs, Jack, the black Labrador, and Harry, the white spotted dog, were quite adorable. They were always excited to see me whenever I came back to the house. Honestly, I’ve never had anyone look so excited to see me every time I walked into the house. I guess that’s why people have pet dogs.

From Harleysville

Harry is also a very good companion when I’m either watching TV or doing some reading.

Unfortunately, he was too used to always being with a human person. I sort of decided that I didn’t want the dogs in the bedroom, so I locked them out of the room that I slept in. They had the rest of the big house to themselves but Harry was not happy with that arrangement. He whined and barked, off and on, throughout the two nights I was there! I could have let the dogs in but I didn’t want to give in to them. If you watch the movie Marley and Me, you’ll see the miserable sleep I had for those two nights.

After a sleepless night, I had to wake up at around 6am to let the dogs out! Crazy dog schedule.

One more thing, I couldn’t get online while I was there. That was the biggest routine buster of all. Fortunately, there was a treadmill in the house, so I was able to squeeze in a run each evening.

From Good Food: Bad Photos

On the last day, I went for another round of chinese buffet. This time they had the black bean mussels but the mussels were small. I also bought a carload full of groceries. So the money I earned from dogsitting all went into the groceries and buffet lunches.

It isn’t really a happy new year.

My car started making rattling sound before Christmas, so I sent it to the mechanic and was told that the alternator would have to be changed. I was without my car during Christmas eve and Christmas day so I couldn’t attend the Christmas eve service in church but thankfully a friend gave me a ride to another friend’s place for Christmas day dinner.

Then came the car repair bill!

After that came my dog and house-sitting days just prior to the new year, which was more stressful than I thought it would be.

And all this time, at the back of my mind, was the pressure of still not getting the permission letters from the two retail stores so that I can get my research started. What I thought would only require 1 month is taking something like 3 months (or more) to get. As of today, still no letters.

I guess it’s understandable that I am not really in the mood to write anything here.