The dog with a special gift...

This is Oscar. He's a rescue pointer cross who is staying with us this week while his owners are away.  He looks pretty innocent doesn't he? But we found out today that Oscar has a dark secret. He can open doors...

This is Bella, she can't open doors, but she likes to steal things and take them into the garden... 

....Alone they are harmless, together they are carnage.

Now before I start this story, I should say that there is a curse that stalks this blog. If I write a post about anything I particularly love, by the end of the week something awful will have happened to it. See here and here for the quilt story as evidence.

So anyway, we left for work this morning and as we normally do we shut the dogs in the kitchen with access to the outside. Any mischief they can get up to there is confined to painting works of art on the tiled floor with their muddy feet.

It was a quiet, non-eventful day at work. Then shortly after 2pm, I had a call from my neighbour Laura, who started the conversation with that slightly unnerving phrase "Don't panic, but..."

It transpired that shortly before she called, she had looked out of her kitchen window and seen Oscar & Bella making off down the street. As she told me this I was desperately racking my brain trying to think of a way in which the dogs might have climbed a 6 foot wall or unlocked a padlocked steel gate, but there was it turns out a simpler explanation...

At some point today Oscar had impressed his new buddies by opening every single door in the downstairs of the house, allowing the three of them free access to the sitting room, sewing room and eventually front hallway.

From there he opened the front door and the two dogs (note Macy stayed in the house!) trotted off down the street.

They were eventually captured by Laura who returned them to the house which was, to quote her "covered in pieces of fabric and your camera is out in the garden".

You can only begin to imagine what went on in my mind at this point... The beautifully stacked piles of fabric I had for my current quilting project, or (God forbid!) my stash of Amy Butler Full Moon, which is so lovely I can only look at it.

I drove home imaging all sorts of chaos. Jim fortunately beat me to the house and cleared a lot of it up and as with many things it could have been a lot worse.... It turns out the fabric that was all over the house was the contents of the rather tempting brown paper bag I keep on the table. The bag contains all the tiny scraps of fabric I have left over, which to be honest most people would bin.

The camera fared a little worse. Bella loves taking things into the garden for her little stash (apparently this is a rescue dog thing!?) and she particularly likes taking anything of mine. So our little beagle heaved a rather large SLR camera, with an even larger flash attached to it into the garden and plonked it down rather heavily on the patio.... which is why that wonderful lens I was raving about yesterday is no more...

(Oscar's "just been told off" face)

I confess, I have cried a little at the sheer waste of its destruction, but I have also been productive and ordered another immediately, it wasn't particularly expensive (in camera equipment terms!) and there is an outside chance the house insurance may cough up.... So onwards and upwards...

PS - Oscar has learned nothing from his experience and has already opened the front door again this afternoon. It is now locked!