House Sitters

I returned home to find a furiously scubbing mad woman, a full litter box, litter strewn about the back yard -directly outside the back door where the children play- and various damage and mess. None of the animal goods, she took the money for, had been bought. Atleast some part of her realized what an atrocity she had committed, as she was still there, scrubbing, in fact she didn't even remove her stuff when she left. We thought she wasn't going to leave. I found her incense burners, my measuring cups, stashed in drawers and burnt with resinous herbs, her underwear, etc, and was able to simply move it to the pile of stuff she left in the garage, or the one she left in the front yard. Nice to have options. Though I eventually consolidated the two piles. When the garbage people wouldn't take all the garbage she had left, I thought I would try sorting it to get some into the recycling possibly, and voila, that is when I found my house keys. She is trying to 'make good' on the money she took. She bought some stuff for the animals yesterday, despite the fact that I was unable to take the "hundreds of dollars worth of energy work" she had done for me as compensation. Someone came in and fixed the broken towel rack, now we just have the floor to sand and re-finish, unless it goes so deep that we have to re-lay it. Last time we had a house sitter, we returned to a still warm crack pipe and lighter on our counter and a house full of cigarette butts, to find our identities even had been stolen. We got a call from the Santa Rosa cop shop a couple weeks later, when they found our marriage certificate, which we had failed to notice missing. It was the passports and account numbers we were concerned about. Now that was an odd one, and this one falls short, by comparison, but house sitters may not be the answer for us in the future. Travel less, scale back on the furry creatures. None of these are really options with my family living on the other side of the continent, not to mention our general wander lust, and we're aquiring new bunnies shortly, as Sofie needs a pet. One of our guinea pigs died while we were gone, so we may have to replace it, unless Anja gets a rabbit too.