Oh, man. I might be the worst dog-sitter ever. Before the story, here’s the cast of characters:
This is Blue:

He is a small and rather quiet, self-possessed hound mix. Blue is somewhat shy and, as his mama warned us, rather nervous around men, so I handled him when Guion came to take the walk with us on Friday night.
And this is Ginger:


Ginger is a spunky and vocal little terrier mix. I can’t, for the life of me, guess what her lineage could possibly be. Do you have any guesses? There’s clearly some terrier in there (the beard and the wiry hair). But her coat color, those little drop ears? No clue. What do you think?
Anyway. So, we show up on Friday night to take them for a walk. Immediately, we can’t find the key anywhere. The dogs are barking; they’re desperate to be let out and I am mildly panicking about it. Thankfully, we finally get in touch with their family and they give us some more insight on where the key is. We get inside and the dogs are a bit frantic and scared. I speak to them softly and go about locating their leashes and walking chain collars.
Without thinking much, I put the chain collars on the dogs (prongs with teeth–I didn’t want to use them, but their nylon collars didn’t have any rings on them) and march them outside. I have Blue and Guion is following behind me with Ginger. I march Blue over the sidewalk into the street and, suddenly, he starts beeping. He ducks his head and his tail and then I realize… CRAP. I just walked that dog straight through an invisible fence.
I felt SO terrible. So terrible. How stupid of me. In the frenzy, I didn’t even think that those big collars with the black boxes on them were probably for an invisible fence–and not for bark control or anything else. (Slightly in my defense, I wasn’t told to take these fence collars off when we were going to take them out for a walk, but I really should have noticed.)
The rest of the weekend, both dogs stopped trusting me when I would take then out–even though I took off the fence collars promptly. I had to actually pantomime that I was taking something off Blue’s neck for him to follow me into the street! The poor thing. I felt so, so horrible about it. Lesson really learned. I hope they’ll forgive me.
But the rest of our time there was pleasant and provincial and I enjoyed our walks with Blue and Ginger. Their family also has a sweet mini-menagerie in the backyard, complete with chickens:


And a funny little bunny, who seemed very friendly and very eager to get out of his hutch:

On an unrelated note, I was thrilled yesterday to learn that I won the Go Pet Friendly giveaway for a Kurgo backseat car cover! (I never win blog giveaways, on the random event that I enter them, so this was quite exciting.) A car seat cover has been on my wish list for a while now, and so I am really excited to receive it and try it out. A nice way to end the week.