Dog Days of Hallowe'en

So here's a funny story and I imagine this was a unique experience, resulting from having a dog, a bed and breakfast and two animatronic Hallowe'en skelly dogs in your kitchen.  Earlier this month we went to Guelph's Home Depot and adopted two skeleton dogs, one that howls and one that barks and makes some pretty nasty noises.  Unloading the car, I set the two dogs on the kitchen table and Mom went off to do more errands while I waited for guests to arrive and check-in.  I of course played with my new pups (which Willow didn't exactly like) and was testing their sound activation... when the doorbell rang.  Oops!  This, of course, set off Willow who dutifully announced an arrival which, of course, set off the two mechanical dogs!  They work just fine, thank you.  So I had three barking, snarling and howling dogs to deal with, and needed to get to the door pronto!  Where to turn first?!  The on/off switch for the dogs of course is in their mouths, on the palate behind their snapping jaws.  So I scooted Willow into the bedroom before gingerly inserting my fingers into one dog's mouth turning it off and hurried out to get the door.  
  I was grinning ear-to-ear and was probably quite red when I greeted our guests, and they asked about the commotion in the house.  I had to laugh as I told them, no, we only have one dog and no she's not making all that horrible noise all by herself.  
          

And so it began...

Last weekend we had our first guests, two couples that took our Creature Comfort and our Meadow rooms.  They were fantastic guests, we're so lucky to have them as our first!  Even Willow got to say hello by request and she made her way around the dining room table after breakfast to greet each guest.  And breakfast:  after cereal and yogurt, we had a tomato- basil-feta-omelette with bacon, then almond croissants and, to finish, plum cake (with plums from the Farmers' Market).

Yes, our dining room has red walls, really red walls.  Even for me, an avid Hallowe'ener, I have to wonder what were they thinking?  I guess they weren't vegetarians, that's for sure!

(Update:  Last week a guest informed us of how common this colour is in older homes (thank you, Mr. Bailey).  It turns out dining rooms were considered "masculine" in the Victorian age and so dark, rich colours like navy blue, dark gold or (yup) deep red were used.  You can read more about this interesting tidbit by clicking here.)

  Our guests wrote lovely comments in our book:

This will become a treasure.

In other news, Willow got sprayed by a skunk, in our very own backyard.  It was last Thursday, around 8:30pm, when I let her out to go for a walk and before I saw it, Willow was nose to nose with a small skunk.  Yup, she got sprayed full in the face but this skunk must have just sprayed someone else or was very young because it wasn't so potent (not like when Russel got sprayed, we nearly died!) and after a bath of V8 (because that's all we had) and soap and water she was allowed to come into the house (but not the bedroom).  All in all, we were lucky!

This weekend, on Sunday, is the Horse and Hound Parade, you can see a very tasteful video here:


It looks wonderful and I think it even goes by our house!  And the Elora Fergus Studio Tour is on, next year I hope to take part:  http://elorafergusstudiotour.com/ .