Waterloo Region Record

How to be the perfect-ish house guest

Chuck Brown Chuck Brown can be reached at brown.chuck@gmail.com

Want to be the perfect house guest? Well, this is the part where a columnist would typically offer helpful information that a reader could think about, put into action or at the very least, use as an ice breaker at dinner.

But on the topic of being the perfect house guest, I have nothing. Literally, at this moment, I am sitting at my sisterin-law’s table, eating her food and leaching off her WiFi.

Maggie, my cat, is sleeping on her bed. Eddie, my wiener dog, is snoring on her couch, which is annoying but better than what he sometimes does — scoot his butt across her rug. We call it his moonwalk, and it really bugs my sister-in-law.

She’s at work, thankfully, because someone has to pay the bills around here.

How and why am I here? Well, for one month now, I have been drifting. I sold my house and, silly me didn’t have a solid place to move into before I did. I won’t go into detail, but here I am while all my stuff is sitting in a 26-foot moving van that I’m paying $40 per day to park. I’m calling it a storage unit. Oh, and my ear hair trimmer is buried in it somewhere, but maybe that’s an issue for another day.

So, that’s how I wound up at my sister-in-law’s, and as I keep reminding her, it’s not permanent. I will move out. I do have a rental lined up.

But I’m sensitive and worried about being a burden. I want to be a good house guest, but I don’t even know if there is such a thing.

A house guest, by nature, is an invasive species, no?

I’m really trying. I’ve bought groceries, but what if I bought the wrong brand of almond milk or the wrong flavour of chips? I’m only making things worse.

Besides, does my stocking the fridge with cottage cheese or placing a bunch of bananas on the kitchen island really compensate for the fact that I am simply just … here. All. The. Time.

When my host comes down to the kitchen to get breakfast and pack a lunch, here I am sipping coffee and eating toast.

Hey.

My host is used to having her space to herself. How annoying am I?

I’m just going to guess very. Very annoying.

Some things, I can control. I can try to be a better, if not perfect, house guest. For example, I unloaded the dishwasher, and I took out the garbage. Pretty good.

However, I will also park myself on the living room couch, fire open a bag of chips and watch hockey or football almost every night. My host assures me it’s fine and that she never watches the living room TV.

I’m not sure I buy it. I don’t want to put myself to bed at 7 p.m. every night, but I can’t shake the feeling that my chip crunching and channel flipping must drive my kind host crazy.

It’s not just me. My pets are horrible house guests. Maggie the cat is quite loving it here. She’s the Queen Bee and she flaunts it. The cat that actually lives here, named Kitten, spends his time hiding under the bed while Maggie snuggles up ON the bed.

Eddie gets anxious easily and often works it out by chewing shoes. This means we’ve had to use the four ottomans on the ground floor to build barriers to keep Eddie away from any and all access to footwear.

So far it’s working but again, I have to think my host-in-law might like to use her ottomans to, like, put her feet on. Once in a while anyway.

What else can we do? We made chili to hopefully buy us a few more days of patience and tolerance before we move out. And I make sure not to shower until after my host has. If she ran out of hot water, she might run me out of the house.

Still, here I am, and when she gets home from a hard day of work, here I’ll be. And Eddie the wiener dog and Maggie the cat are here owning the place. We are crunching, couch-hogging, kitten-bothering. Just us and a bunch of bananas.

ARTS & LIFE

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2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://waterloorecord.pressreader.com/article/281994675694170

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