All posts filed under: petsitting

Housesitting in San Francisco : View from Bernal Heights today

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We are housesitting in San Francisco. The way this works is that we got connected with a family who went to visit family on the East Coast and needed somebody (us) to look after their cat, dog, home and plants during their absence. In exchange for our reliable housesitting duties we stay here free of charge. It is a fair exchange of our time for accommodation. We added up the time that we spend caring for the pets and if you paid somebody the hours that we put in then that person could pay rent on a pretty decent place to live. So while I regularly see the headline ‘how to travel for free & housesitting” in the same sentence on the internet it is not really ‘free’. It requires commitment and time that often can clash with other activities that you might prefer to engage in. For me for example it generally means that I can not go out and explore the city as freely as I naturally would because the dog needs attention every …

When the dog and I saved a baby groundhog on Land’s End Trail, San Francisco

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We are house sitting in San Francisco, pretty close to Land’s End Trail and with that pretty close to the edge of the world, or so it feels. The air is amazing here, the silence only broken occasionally by soft voiced fog horns. On a recent walk with the dog that came with the house, dog and I discovered a Groundhog laying in shock, exposed by the side of the trail. My theory is that another dog had previously dug the groundhog baby up and now it was petrified to move. Our house sitting dog pointed her gentle nose at the groundhog and then walked away, leaving me to scoop it up in my XL sized sweater sleaves. J and I took a couple of photos of it while I checked out if it looked hurt. And I then carried it to an area with deeper grass, just meters from the finding location, and let it walk off the little impromptu wooly nest that it had been sitting on. Groundhog baby walked without a limp …

We are house sitting in SF

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So it is official: since Tuesday we are house sitting and looking after one lovely dog and two super soft cats, right in San Francisco.   The animals need special attention and a certain amount of company which is why we have the opportunity to swap pet care (and basic home care) for a month of fe accommodation somewhere not far from Golden Gate Park, the Golden Gate Bridge and even a glorious beach. It is quite a commitment that we took on, acting for animals can be a bit like caring for children, in as far as you really can’t casually neglect them because you would like to go and follow some impromptu plans instead.    So our lives for the next four weeks will be planned very much around the animal needs. It’s good practice for thinking about having pets again ourselves in the future ( or even small humans). So far the dog is the impersonification of well behaved and the cats, well we have a hard time stopping cuddling them, they …