Tick(ed) Off

An unpleasant experience this morning involved removing an engorged tick from the mouth area of our husky. I suspect that he picked it up from our hike at Emma Long park last week, but it's possible it came from the neighborhood, as we have a lot of deer here. No telling. Stepan might have thought to take a picture of it after removal and happily included it in his blog, but alas I flushed it down the toilet right away, so no pics to show. Not really sure why I'm so grossed out by the tick today -- I've seen and removed numerous ticks throughout my life. But this one has left me rather nauseous. It makes three ticks I've seen recently. One crawled on me in my front yard, another across Nolan's foot in Bastrop State Park a couple of weeks ago, and now this one on Loki. I used sterilized tweezers to remove it, and amazingly Loki rather calmly let me. He hates having his mouth area messed with, or having to be held down. But I was calm about it, so I guess he was. Tick removed, no blood released. Me grossed out. Dog happily fell asleep.