On Monday evening I returned from a really terrific visit with some dear friends in West, by God, Virginia. It’s beautiful country, and I had a great time. We pressed cider, visited with friends and family, had two bonfires, watched a meteor shower, took a nice walk, and ate (too much) delicious food.
But then on Tuesday morning – Uh, oh! Red was doing a lot of licking so I checked, and he brought home fleas from WV. 🙁 While I was down there my friends warned me that they’d been having trouble with fleas on their dog for a few months, although he was currently flealess; by that time there was nothing I could do about it. Red hasn’t had fleas in several years.
So I broke out the flea remedies. That meant first distributing a fine white powder (totally non-toxic to pets and people, but it kills fleas by breaking their ‘shells’), then spraying Red with a repellant that would make the fleas want to jump off. That’s followed by what I call monkey grooming twice a day – laying him on my lap and searching through his fur for any unwanted critters and squishing them. BIG PAIN IN THE BUTT. Plus, now my rug and floors look like it did outside yesterday morning.
heavily powdered rug
light powdered snow
(We had way more snow over the course of the day – a total of about 2″ – so everything was beautifully coated with white. Beautiful, even though it’s still October.)
Then on Thursday afternoon I found a tick on him. I used the old match trick to get the tick off.
While I hate ticks, at least once they’re off, they’re gone. Fleas – they take much longer to deal with. I’m not happy about this. It takes quite a bit of the bloom off the rose of the great time I had while visiting. I didn’t want that to happen. I just need to take it all in stride, I guess. And be thankful that I hadn’t yet gotten myself another cat or dog – two animals is twice the work of one in these instances, for sure.
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