It's time to tell you about our latest Adventures While Walking with Mom. On the day after Halloween, we can always count on having a special adventure because of all the candy and stuff that the trick-or-treaters dropped. Mom likes to look for candy that hasn't been opened. She doesn't care about the empty wrappers, for some reason, although we dogs like to sniff the wrappers because they smell yummy.
So when we went out walking on Sunday morning, we looked for candy, and we saw several kinds that Mom doesn't like, so she didn't pick them up. Finally, we found a Butterfingers and a Milky Way, so Mom took them home and ate them, even though they are not her very favorite kinds of candy. Then yesterday Mom found a package of PEANUT M&Ms, which she loves, so she was very happy!
We had lots of small Good Adventures on the day after Halloween because we found so many candy wrappers. Also Gabe found an ACTUAL CANDY BAR that was only partly eaten, but then he dropped it and I picked it up, but then I dropped it, too. So Mom told us "Leave it!" and she dragged us away from the candy. Mom thinks it was probably a Snickers bar because it had peanuts and chocolate (which is POISONOUS to dogs!). It smelled good, but it was very weird and different from the regular dog treats like we are used to eating, and when you bit down on it, your teeth kind of got stuck. So that's why Gabe and I both dropped the candy bar.
Another thing we saw on the day after Halloween was a hat that used to be part of somebody's costume. It was orange with a black-and-white polka-dot hat band. We don't know what kind of costume it was part of, but we're pretty sure that it wasn't a witch.
Anyway, that's enough about candy wrappers. Here's something else we see when we walk by a certain yard. We call it "St. Francis and the Gnomes." I think this would be a great name for a Christian rock band that plays music about gardening. If you know of any bands like this that need a name, just tell them about this one!
Here's a picture of a woolly worm on our driveway. People say that woolly worms can predict what type of winter we will have. I did some research on this, and I found that some people say the black stripes mean there will be a bad winter, and other people say it's the brown stripe. But more people seem to think it's the black stripes, so if we go by that, we can see that the brown stripe is at least as long as the two black stripes put together. Which means we will have a fairly mild winter here in Missouri, according to this woolly worm. One of my sources said that woolly worms are correct 85% of the time, so you can be pretty confident that this prediction will come true.
Mom told me that when she was a kid, she used to capture woolly worms and put them in jars. She hoped they would make a cocoon and then in the spring they would come out of the cocoon as a beautiful butterfly or something. But the one woolly worm Mom had that made a cocoon never came out in the spring, so she didn't know what a woolly worm would actually turn into if it survived the winter. Well, I have done some research, and I learned that woolly worms turn into something called the Isabella Tiger Moth. They are prettier than most moths I've seen, but I'll bet they would still eat your clothes, if they got the chance!
Oh, and here's one last Walking Adventure I had yesterday: I got to go for a walk all by myself with Mom! This happened because Gabe had to get a bunch of x-rays at Dr. Patricia's office. Mom was surprised that I walked so nicely and fast, too, and I hardly balked at all. Maybe, since I was such a good little walker, Mom and I can go walking all by ourselves again sometime.
And before I quit writing, I have to tell you what we found out about Gabe from his x-rays. It turns out that in Gabe's neck there are two disc things that are all kind of crunched together, and in his back there are three disc things that are the same way. So this explains why Gabe has trouble going up the stairs sometimes. He doesn't complain much, but I can tell that it hurts him. Of course, Gabe blames the horrible, vicious greyhounds for his neck and back problems, and Dr. Patricia said that maybe the greyhounds were to blame, but maybe not, either. Anyway, Gabe has to get more prednisone for two weeks, and Mom is supposed to walk him more, but Mom doesn't know for sure when she will find time to do that!
