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The phone never stopped ringing. By August, we were not just filled up for most of the Christmas period, we were already overbooked for two days at that time. 

All that water we had received in the form of snow and then spring flooding had provided the perfect breeding ground for blackflies and mosquitos, which were out in force. No one, including the dogs, wanted to be outside, especially as it got warmer. You could drench yourself with bug spray, but they still managed to buzz around you like little imps of hell, getting in your eyes and ears. John remarked that it was the only time he was actually happy to have to wear hearing aids, as they blocked access to the gnats.

Unlike my idealised fantasies, the dogs were not always frolicking happily together. Some would stand at the gate and bark mindlessly, loudly and constantly the whole time they were out. Some would jump up on us repeatedly and rake their claws down our backs. Some would test the fence line to see if there was a way to get out of the yard. Some would dig holes, either at the fence line, or just in the soaking ground. Some would snap at any other dog that came within touching distance of them. Some would obsess over some other particular dog and try constantly to hump their chosen victim.

We started to get visits from local kennel owners. We were on our guard the first time it happened. But unlike Kennel Boy, they were all really nice, friendly and supportive. One generous woman opined that having a new and different kind of kennel was a good thing as it would make all of the other kennel owners step up their game. Of course, she could afford to be generous. She had just sold her kennel.

This lady insisted that we didn’t need to subdivide our cat room; that the cats could simply roam around the cat room together. This was how they did it at her kennel.

She then proceeded to tell us of the occasion when one of their staff had neglected to close the window in the communal cat room when they left for the night. The cats got the screen off and they all escaped. Some came back, they managed to find others, and some were never seen again.

One elderly lady whose cat escaped, came around for weeks and sat out on the front lawn, hoping her cat would see her and return. The kennel owner felt terrible of course, so she would go out and chat with the client, offering her tea or lemonade.

A woman called on a Friday that June. We’ll call her Mrs. Daft. She had a dog she wanted to board for the weekend, starting right away. It was 5 p.m. It was 32 degrees, we already had 24 dogs to be walked three times a day, plus I had spent several hours of my ‘free time’ baking dog biscuits. I was exhausted. I knew John would have said no, and that fortified my own resolve. I told Mrs. Daft that we couldn’t take her dog. Then she played her trump card. She had been referred by a good friend of mine from my law firm days. With an inward groan, I decided I had to say yes.

Mrs. Daft said they’d bring Max, a mixed breed dog, at 6 p.m. In  accordance with our new policy, I told her firmly that we would be closed between 5:30 and 7 p.m. 

“That’s no good”, Mrs. Daft informed me.“We will have to be there at 6:30”.

I again said no. They must wait until 7:00. She reluctantly agreed. We staggered back to the house to rustle up some supper. At 7:00 p.m., we returned to the kennel, expecting our new arrival to be sitting at the locked gate, panting with eagerness to get in. Or, going by previous experience, climbing over the gate.

My head was still full of the need to find some way of getting the word out; to generate interest in our new endeavour and get those bookings rolling in. The Ottawa Kennel Club venture had been a dead loss. The Yellow Pages ads were good, but they weren’t enough.

The internet was barely on our radar. We did get a rather primitive website up and running, but hardly anyone contacted us through that. Google had just been incorporated as a privately held corporation the year before. At that point it was little more than a gleam in Sergey Brin’s eye, and certainly no one was using it to promote their business.

We decided to hold an Open House. We got our trusty design firm to produce cute postcard-like invitations and mailed them to every vet, groomer, breeder and pet store we could think of, as well as the people who had left their names and addresses for follow up at the Ottawa Kennel Club show. We sent invitations to friends, family and neighbours; basically, anyone with a pulse whose name we knew and whose address we could find.

I’ve already talked about how we had record snowfalls that winter, so fierce that roads had been closed for more than 24 hours. Well, around the beginning of April, the weather turned freakishly warm. All the snow that had accumulated throughout the winter melted, all at once it seemed. Then it started raining and continued without pause. Flooding arrived in short order. The marshy ground beside the driveway and the lower part of our front lawn were now under about two feet of water.

John, deciding to see the humorous side of it, put up a sign: “Griffiths Lake, No Fishing”.

As a building started to emerge amid the constant blizzards, we started considering how to market our new and improved approach to cat and dog boarding facilities.  

I knew from my experience putting a Champion title on my beloved Toby that the Ottawa Kennel Club had a dog show in November.

This was a euphoric time. We were in that wonderful liminal phase you sometimes hit in life, like summer vacation when you’re a student, or a hiatus between two jobs. You are more or less done with the responsibilities of one phase of your life, and not yet engaged in the inevitable frustrations and vexations of the new. In our case there was the added excitement of being off the beaten path, into uncharted sections of the map of our lives.

The omens continued to be propitious. I reached an easy and amicable parting of the ways with my law firm. My partners agreed to pay me for another, final year without the necessity of my actually showing up and doing any work. Having this cushion of income during the time we would be trying to get the kennel built, running and profitable was an incredible comfort to us.

A year should be plenty of time to come up with a design, get permits, obtain financing, hire contractors, construct a unique building, fully conceptualize our business, market it, get a client base, fill up those oversized dog and cat rooms and start making a profit, right? Right?

Now that we had found our property, it was time to move along with planning. This amorphous term covered a number of things from the obvious, like packing up our stuff in preparation for our move, to the more delicate, like breaking it to our family and friends that our life was about to take a rather eccentric detour.

And oh yes, procuring another Siamese cat. The local paper had a plea from a nearby shelter begging anyone with experience with Siamese cats to come forward to adopt a large male. As it happened, the cat had the same name as one of the cats we then owned, Pyewacket. It seemed like it was destined.

When we arrived at the shelter, we were taken to a back office with a large sign on the door stipulating in huge letters: “No one but Geri is to open this door or attempt to TOUCH this cat.”

While we were pondering these mysteries, Gerry, the real estate agent who had sold the dream house to us less than a year before, returned my call. Manfully hiding his incredulity, he happily agreed to list the property for us. He wouldn’t have to put in much work for his commission after all, as we had changed little in the scant ten months we had occupied it. He was on his way out of town on vacation, but brought us the Listing Agreement to sign before he left. The ‘For Sale’ sign would be put up on his return.

Gerry agreed with our assessment that it would probably take a year or more to sell our house. It was a large property in a small town. Before we bought it, the house had been on the market for two years. For once, we were actually fine with a long wait before we sold our house. We would have the year while we were trying to sell, to make up our minds about the future course of our life; time to plan and organize our major life change. While at that point we were not at all sure what we were going to do with the next part of our lives, we were pretty convinced that it would not involve this particular (expensive) property. If we decided we wanted to stay there after all, we could just take the property off the market.

Rewind back to February, 1998. 

On the surface, we appeared to have an ideal life.

We lived in a three story, historic-register house in Almonte, a picturesque small town only a 30 minute commute to my office in Ottawa. Pocket doors between two enormous parlours. Oak wainscoting throughout. Built-in china and linen cupboards. Fireplaces upstairs and down. A glass-walled sunroom that overlooked the acre of gardens, majestic 50 foot tall black walnut trees, ornamental pond and swimming pool. All of it surrounded by an antique iron fence with big stone gates. Our poor man’s Kennedy compound included a rustic brick potting shed and a two-story carriage house/garage, with a full basement under it. The carriage house was connected to the house by a tunnel. How cool was that? I was living in an episode of “Dream House”.

The house was hardly big enough to contain all of the stuff we had collected over the years – antiques, art, musical instruments, thousands of books, fine china, silver and crystal, my antique doll and toy collection, John’s model trains and train memorabilia.