Caleb's walk

Andy is in Indiana for a couple of weeks visiting family and celebrating his grandfather's 100th birthday. Since I am missing the festivities, I'm concentrating on keeping the dog from pouting the entire time- he HATES it when Andy is gone. So, I thought I would take him on one of our favorite activities- a walk along the railroad tracks downtown to the library. He loves that he can explore both sides of the tracks and the trees.

However, I didn't factor in that it was sunny and hot, so Caleb didn't want to do too much walking on the tracks themselves. He wandered off into the bushes where it was shady...I didn't notice until we got all the way to town (about 25 minutes of walking) that he had gotten into some burr bushes. Little fuzzy burrs were tangled in the hair on his legs, feet, belly, and face- he even had them stuck in between his toes. The poor dog was panting like crazy from the effort of walking with those mean burrs stuck in his paw pads.

I didn't have any choice but to walk him back home, by which time he was limping pathetically. I tried to cut out the burrs myself, but I stopped after 20 minutes, I had counted 250 burrs removed, and not made a visible dent in the appearance of the burr infestation, and the poor dog was so stressed he just whined the whole time. I gave in, called PetSmart (the only dog groomer open at 5:00 on Saturday), and took him down there for their professional help. I think they may have just given him a bath and roughly brushed the burrs out, but at least he was mainly burr-free by the time he got to me. He still had a few random burrs in his beard and on his belly, which didn't make me very happy about the $35 bill...but at least he could walk again.

Four days later, though, he's still limping...so we had to cancel our trip to the beach for a few days until his little tootsies don't hurt anymore. I don't think I did a good job of disctracting him from being depressed while Andy's gone- poor little dog!