Catch-up

Our weekend was pretty busy, and I meant to blog yesterday, but work was crazy and will be again today. But I've got a few minutes. Poor Bandit scuffed up his paws pretty badly while herding Saturday morning. I had him out in a dirt pen, and it had been so long since we'd worked on dirt that I forgot to keep an eye on his feet. He ended up blistering the entire big pad on each of his paws - to the point where the top layer of each pad essentially blistered right off. Ouch!

I did an emergency wrap on them at the farm, then washed and redid the dressings when we got home. A few hours later, I went to change the bandages again, and it turned into a huge ordeal. His pads had started bleeding, and the gauze was sticking, which made it extremely painful when I took them off - he was yelping like crazy. I felt so bad!

He wouldn't let me touch his feet after that, so I had to get Marc to come and hold him down while I tried to put on the new bandages. Well, by this time, Bandit had pretty much decided he'd had enough, thank you, and started showing teeth. So I pulled out a Gentle Leader and used it to make a makeshift muzzle. Even with this though, Marc still had a hard time keeping him down, and Bandit kept getting up and consequently getting blood everywhere. At one point when we had him pinned down, the look on his face was priceless - he was wide-eyed, staring at me, and not blinking at all. And he didn't take his eyes off me for a second - he was MAD. I'd never seen him so mad at me!

So I decided to switch places with Marc, and this time I put a towel over Bandit's head so that he couldn't see what was coming. This actually helped a lot, because he calmed down considerably, and Marc was able to put the new bandages on pretty quickly.

Right after that, Bandit was back to his old self, looking for attention, seemingly having forgotten just how pissed off he was just a minute earlier. But the poor guy was hobbling around everywhere - he was trying to walk on just his tip-toes, and that's not an easy feat for a dog. We ended up having to carry him up and down the stairs just to help him out.

As of yesterday his feet seem to be much better - he's walking around a lot more, and he seems to be walking pretty normally now. At this point, I don't know if he'll be able to compete on Sunday, but that's probably something we'll have to decide like the day before.

One of our foster cats, Pepper, got adopted yesterday. The family that adopted her saw her at Petsmart, and I guess their son really bonded with her. They seem like a good family, so hopefully it's a good home for her. This is probably the hardest part about fostering, because it's so hard to know what's going to happen to these guys. Her brother, Mo, is still with us, and the poor guy was walking around, meowing forlornly, presumably looking for his sister.

Mo has figured out how to open the door to the guest bedroom we're keeping them in. The door knob is the kind that has a handle (not just a round knob), and he's figured out that he can pull on it to make the door open. Smart little sucker. I went into the room the other day, and found out just exactly how he's been doing it. I heard him playing with the door knob, and when I cracked open the door, there was Mo, with his back feet perched on the cat tree that's by the door, and his front feet perched on the door handle. So, I think we may have to change the door knob in that room!