WMDs

Emergency Contact and I did our (now) usual trick of needing to get out of Sydney for NYE, but still wanting to celebrate it somehow. So we got onto the The Family Gag Reflex, who we've holidayed with before (China. Thailand. Bucca Wauka). They're great company and have their priorities set correctly. Do something. Get comfortable after doing something. Get fed and watered once comfortable.

After EC and I asked if they would like to invite us up for NYE, they invited us up for NYE. Psychic. They were off on their own holiday about 24 hours after we arrived but remained unfazed; they asked if we would like to house-sit once they were gone.

It's the sign of a truly classy host when, in making their place ours, they made it sound like we were doing them a favour. So we got the run of a lovely huge house with an in-ground pool – and two whippets.

My philosophy on borrowing people's stuff is, wherever possible, leave it better than you found it. If not, at least as you found it. But Yuki and Otto, the Whippets of Mass Destruction, have got it in for me. They are determined to make sure I'm a nervous wreck by the time I leave the Gag Reflex household.

Waving the family goodbye on day one, I turned around to see the smaller whippet, Otto, had already pilfered a good shoe from an impossibly high place and was giving it the treatment. The family hadn't even turned the end of the street.

After feeding them early the next morning we went back to bed. We re-emerged to find that rather than a packet next to the toilet, the whippets think it's handier to keep rolls of toilet paper in small pieces everywhere around the house. Certain tissue boxes have suffered the same interior redesign.

But the whippet rebellion that seemed to be a direct poke in the eye to my dog management skills was this. Coming home after being out for brunch for only a couple of hours, we opened the back door to let the dogs in and one of them ran straight into the only bit of carpet in the room, dropped a quick dog-egg in front of the TV, and then ran straight back outside.

Another person is coming in to house-sit for a few days after EC and I leave. I'll be quite glad once I hear that the Gag Reflexes returned to their house to find it wasn't burnt to the ground by a whippet running past rough surfaces with matches in its mouth.

When Devo ask if whippet good? No. Bad whippet.

(Hard to stay angry at something so cute, though)