Month: October 2015

A Day In The Life Of Bill The Housesitter by Overheard Productions (Bill Quinn)

Overheard Productions General Pet Care Advice, Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales , , , , , , , , ,
Sergeant Schultz und Colonel Klink Mit Wilhelm Quinn Fur Ein Tag
Sergeant Schultz und Colonel Klink Mit Wilhelm Quinn Fur Ein Tag

Welcome to a Day In The Life of “Colonel Klink” und “Sergeant Schultz” von Liverpool, New South Wales, Australie.

Those are not their real names and the location given is the area rather than the actual localité.

Today I want to show you what a typical day…. wait, scratch that. I do not have typical days and neither do the pets.

NOT having a routine is a good thing for almost all sentient mammalian beings. Unless that being has severe chemical or physical or mental issues, in which case, the more strict the regime the better.

That is not the case with these two. Sure, Klink has traditionally been extremely anxious, and Schultz has had some real challenges in his lifetime, on the whole those have been nurture issues related to their environment.

And let me make this plainer than plain: it is NOT to do with the house and the others in it. The two homo sapien friends of C & S have provided a loving, caring, diverse, well-looked-after-without-over-pampering household.

BUT, on all three sides, over all three boundary fences are extremely nervous dogs with some severe behavioural challenges. And haven’t really fully clapped eyes on them all yet, but sight is not a sense needed to come to that conclusion.

That is not a problem; it’s an opportunity. I have been in-house friends with these two Germans now for three weeks and 3.6 days roughly.

Even in that time, I have NOT taught them commands or tricks or behaviours inconsistent with how I found them. BUT they have both calmed down considerably. Bear in mind that this is THE first time they have both been separated from their significant others who have significantly less fur.

Let’s begin.

Earlier on Woensday nacht before I ducked out shortly to the shops
Earlier on Woensday nacht before I ducked out shortly to the shops
Schultz: if he were any more laid back... no, I don't see how that would be possible!
Schultz: if he were any more laid back… no, I don’t see how that would be possible!

05:36 AEDST, Thor’s Day 29 Oktober (Festen?!) 2015 Continue reading →

Bill The Housesitter Video #2 – Bill, What Do You Do?

Overheard Productions General Pet Care Advice, Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales , , , , , , , ,

This is the blog section of the Bill The Housesitter site. See above tabs for ‘About’, ‘Availability’, ‘Contact’ and ‘References’.

People often ask me, Bill, what do you do?

You’ve got this Overheard Productions thing you say is a home-based operation mostly, and then there’s the house-siting. Can you provide salient examples and unpack the minutiae of your routinus caninus and entertainus (here we are now, entertain us).

Here within and thereto under, I pledge thee a trough. For the dogs’ water.

Here’s some moving pictures. (♪♪♪ What about me, it isn’t fair ♪♪♪ — True story. I house-sat next door to Gary the guitarist from Moving Pictures last year. Gave him some copies of my articles in Trad and Now magazine. He was rather impressed at my advice to artists article.)

Please press <PLAY>…

Here’s the result of the investment of about 20 minutes of my time in the wee small hours before this was shot:

 

Click on picture
Click on picture

Bill Quinn
Bill The Housesitter
23:36, Tuesday 20 October 2015

Holsworthy, New South Wales, Australia

Bill The Housesitter Video #1 – G’day From Sydney, Australia

Overheard Productions General Pet Care Advice, Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales
Bill The Housesitter
Bill The Housesitter

This is the blog section of the Bill The Housesitter site. See above tabs for ‘About’, ‘Availability’, ‘Contact’ and ‘References’.

Some sites suggest that we, as housesitters, should add video content.

I’ve resisted.

Up until now.

Bill The Housesitter
(Currently) Sydney, Australia

Friday 16 October 2015
On a day when I was working hard yet hardly working

[Reference] West Wollongong, New South Wales including reference

Overheard Productions Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales , , , , , , , ,

This is the blog section of the Bill The Housesitter site. See above tabs for ‘About’, ‘Availability’, ‘Contact’ and ‘References’.

West Wollongong
West Wollongong

This week-long house-sit straddled the start of October 2015 and came to me like manna from heaven. Book-ended by two x six week house-sits, it was an eight day stretch that was potentially going to be tough to fill, and possibly expensive if it meant heading to a youth hostel for the duration.

So when it bobbed up on a house-sitting web-site, I was onto it like a seagull on a chip.

It’s a good example of how sometimes a bit of mutual trust can work out beneficially for all concerned. The home-owners took me sight unseen, as they were flying out of the country the morning I was finishing up north of Newcastle. I used the NSW Transport Plan Your Trip site to plot this transport solution:

And strike me, with eight possible fail points, I arrived at the front door at 15:27!

You have to be a little wary of letting yourself into a strange place with a strange dog at the door, even a pint-sized one. The little Jack Russell took one look at me and seemed to think, ‘Right, well, I’d best be showing you around, then’, and we set off to the backyard to case the joint.

Continue reading →

[Reference] Corlette, New South Wales – Two energetic Cavoodles

Overheard Productions Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the blog section of the Bill The Housesitter site. See above tabs for ‘About’, ‘Availability’, ‘Contact’ and ‘References’.

Corlette, New South Wales
Corlette, New South Wales

My house-sit in August to September 2015 was in a locality I’d never heard of until I saw the ad. This happens quite often!

Corlette, New South Wales is at the end of a peninsula above Newcastle, bounded by Port Stephens and the Pacific Ocean, about an hour’s drive to Newcastle and two and a half hours to Sydney. Outside of the peak holiday times, it’s got the laid-back feel of a coastal resort, with the demographics skewed to the older echelons.

It was quiet in my street, though the daily fly-overs from the nearby air force base were noticeable.

My charges were two Cavoodles, one a Cavalier cross toy poodle and one a cross miniature poodle. Corlette, Nelson Bay and Salamander Bay are very popular with -oodles of all varieties and we met many out and about on our walks.

This was one thing that really struck me about the region: I’ve never met so many friendly dog-walkers so up for a chat. Some people said this was a characteristic of a rural area, but I’ve been in some country areas where people are hard-pressed to give you the time of day.

Either way, I got to talk to scores of people out and about during the five+ weeks I was there.

Apart from the regular walks to the marina at Nelson Bay and around the hilly streets of Corlette (much of it new and under new development), there was the enchanting Tomaree National Park. A walk to the top of Tomaree Head was breathtaking but worth it.

Tomaree Head
Tomaree Head

Continue reading →

Bill The Housesitter – New website

Overheard Productions Housesitter Blog, Tails Of Tales , , , , , ,

This is the blog section of the Bill The Housesitter site. See above tabs for ‘About’, ‘Availability’, ‘Contact’ and ‘References’.

This website was under construction — for all of 49 minutes. My WordPress skills are coming on a treat!

I’ve registered this new website today to make it a little easier for prospective ‘clients’ to find me. (‘Clients’ is a rubbery term since it’s a non-commercial operation.)

My occupational hazard is to run into friendly pet-owners in the street or at a dog park, get chatting, and they then ask if I have a card. I do have this one, but…

Bill The Housesitter

it doesn’t have the website address on it. And when I tried to explain the old website, well, it just rolled off the tongue like a brick.

I have found that Googling ‘Bill The Housesitter’ would sometimes find it first hit and sometimes not. A bloke on the street in Lane Cove North whipped out his iPhone and it was the top spot. When I tried a few days later in the Parramatta Public Library, I got the details of some 64 year old dude from Tobacco Spit, Missouri.

So herewith, I present to you www.BillTheHousesitter.com

One of the great advantages of this separate site over the old version is that I can use lots of tabs to segregate information. (The former was restricted to a single page as it was an off-shoot of my music/interviews blog.) So availability, references and my general blurb all appear neatly under tabs at the top of the page.

An old acquaintance hadn’t realised the full extent of what I do until last night when he saw the old page. He immediately had 20 questions, mostly about security, liability and such like. Hopefully the tabs will provide easy access to this information for potential users of my services.

(Note: My friend latched on to the fact that I do this on a no-fee basis and believes my business name should be ‘The Diddly Squatter’. Trademark registered, all rights reserved, Adrian, lower Blue Mountains, NSW.)

What this new format allows me to do with the dedicated blog is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: write about some of the amazing animals, locations and anecdotes I stumble upon on, living this rather unusual lifestyle. Approaching two years full-time now, it’s gone from something of necessity being the mother of invention to an approach I actively enjoy and embrace.

It won’t be a regular thing, but I’m going to blog on a bit about the blessings, burdens, delights, joys, pitfalls and pleasures of being a full-time housesitter. And without turning it into an all-out travel blog, I’d like to record a bit about the places I go, the things I see, the quirky bits that amuse and bemuse me.

A sort of an, “If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belrose” sort of thing.

Come with?

I may do a little light back-tracking. My first housesits were in Hawker in the ACT many years ago, but I didn’t really get into the swing until late 2011, and then after leaving a particularly unpleasant houseshare, I started to loose myself from the binds of a place to laughingly call ‘home’.

So in those years, there have been some formidable and formidable (fr.) experiences.

It is strictly no surnames, no pack drill for clients and pets. Privacy laws and common courtesy rule supreme.

So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin!

Bill Quinn

Wednesday 7 October 2015, 2pm
Holsworthy, New South Wales, Australia