A Walk to Remember

I was going to save this story just for my PA (Planet Airedale) forum members, but hey, I haven't blogged in almost a week.

Yes, I'm aware at how nerdy it is that I'm a member of a forum for lovers of a certain dog breed.

Last night. was. AWFUL. Grizzly and I went for a walk. We went a new direction to mix things up. We were doing well despite the annoyingly cold weather.

YANK. Walk back 10 feet because something smelled good (to Griz). Sniff a bush. Find a treasure. EWW. It's a dead mouse. Luckily, once I yelled ewwww! he had dropped it already.

Keep walking. Turn the corner onto a street full of "mystery". I get yanked all over the place as Grizzly has to stop and smell everything. Usually this means people leave crap all over their lawns, as in old food, garbage, and cat crap. Nice street.

I get yanked again, and give up and look at this ridiculous house while the dog sniffs another yard. This house was VERY decorated for Easter. I mean you could tell they'd been saving decorations from several decades ago. And why replace old decorations when you can just add them to a monstrous non-matching-but-spring-time collection? Classy.

Well I turn back around and Griz has found yet another treasure. This time, a dead bird. Ewww!
He would not drop this one. Luckily he didn't just chomp down on it and was just holding it. He re-caught it a few times so that he could get a better hold, but that's when I could finally grab his teeth – not the bird – and open his jaws to let the thing fall out. Grossness over. Story not over. Walking on...

We're on the last street before ours. We run into a guy walking his dog, and we let the dogs socialize a bit. They sort of jump around each other while the guy and I try to untangle the leashes. Then I look at Grizzly, and he's sort of squatting like he has to poo, but then he just sits there looking sad. So I go over to him, and realize he has these sticker-pokey-balls all over his legs! No! They're in his beard, too! Then his face gets itchy and he starts rubbing it on the ground. No no no! Time to go home.

I throw Griz in the backyard with me to start pulling out the pokey-balls. These things are tough. They look like fuzz-balls, about the size of a finger-nail, but are really evil and pokey and sticky and break apart when you squeeze too hard so that you can never get the whole thing out. Let me remind you our dog has lots of thick curly hair. The more you try to grab at the pokey-balls the more they get entangled with his hair.

He starts running around the yard all weird, bucking and jumping. Then he does this low waddle thing like he has to poop, but keeps moving around. Finally he takes a full 3 minutes at least, just squatting and trying to push poo out. It was so sad. Finally he got a little, and I cheered. THEN he starts rubbing his butt on the ground. Oh no. It wasn't poop. The pokey-balls. are on. his butt. Up to this point I thought my job would be somewhat easy. I can tell Griz is too embarrassed to let me look at his bum, so I just grab him, put him between my knees, grab his tail and help him out. That's right. I pulled pokey-balls off his pooper. And some...were contaminated. And then I wiped his poopy bum. I am the bravest woman ever because I did it all with my bare hands.

It's not over.

It gets too cold to continue outside, so we go in. I start pulling the pokey-balls off his legs and everywhere else. Grizzly tried to help me. Then the teamwork was over and I had to grab one leg at a time to make sure I got them all out, then brushed each one with a wire brush, which he hates. We're 2 hours into this by now, and he's actually being a trooper, considering he usually doesn't let me brush him for 2 seconds. I noticed he started swallowing the pokey-balls and he'd pull them out, or he'd even pick them off the floor sometimes. Well he's start doing this gag-cough thing, so I'd give him water and he'd be good for a while. Well apparently these things don't go down very easily. Grizzly barfed. Twice. Dog food and everything else. I'm all grossed out and have to clean it up, but I can't let Griz leave the dining room to rub on everything and make more of a mess.

I'd say 3 hours into it now, it's like 9:00 and I am officially having an emergency and ask AJ to order pizza since I'm freaking out and can't make dinner. I go to grab the broom to sweep up the mess. BARF. I wipe up the barf. BARF. Grizzly finds more of the pokey-ball remnants to eat. BARF. I go upstairs to get the vacuum so he won't find any more to eat. BARF.

This dog puked like 8 times. I kid you not. And AJ was trying to ask what pizza toppings I wanted. EWW I couldn't think about it.

Some how we managed to eat our pizza, then AJ helped me out big time and took Grizzly up to the tub to give him a bath, so I could finally sweep and vacuum in peace. Clean floors, check.

It's still not over. Grizzly had approximately 25 pokey-ball things STUCK in his beard. He only has a baby beard now, so that means his little chin had turned into one huge hairy pokey-ball. I got up to the bathroom in time to help out AJ a little. By some miracle we managed to saved his baby beard and pulled the junk out of his chin and the corners of his mouth and the edges of his lips. The whole time he was this sopping wet sad little creature.

And just like that (over 4 hours later) it was over. Grizzly bear was so happy he ran into our room and jumped in our bed. But then we all had a hard time sleeping because he did the gag-cough thing all night. But no more puking, hooray!

Sorry, no pictures, I had my hands full. If you actually made it this far, thanks for your pity, and thanks for reading.