Last night I went out with my parents and grandparents to Borders and then to Denny's. My plan was to go see The Corpse Bride with Giselle after dinner (along with the usual contingency plan of going alone if she proved as difficult to get ahold of as usual).

When we got home from Denny's, I noticed what looked like droplets of blood on our doorstep. I didn't pay it much mind (it is Halloween, after all). I was a bit late for Corpse Bride, so I went to my room to see what movies started a little later. While there, Chelsea came up to me and offered me her ear for me to scratch. When I pet her, though, I noticed the fur around her ear was matted with a reddish-orange substance that kind of looked like blood.

I called papi and we investigated her more closely. We couldn't find any obvious injuries, but it was difficult to tell with the fur so matted. What we did find, though, were several dozen ticks burrowed in her flesh, including one really big whitish one in the middle of her back that I first thought was a tooth from a dog or something. Papi fetched a pair of tweezers and we set to work. When we pulled out the big white one, it had a bunch of crawly arms on the end like a hermit crab. Pleasant.

After pulling out all the ticks we could find, we bathed her in anti-tick shampoo to finish off any remaining bugs and also to clean up the matted fur. Even once she was clean, we couldn't find any injuries on her aside from one tiny scratch on her ear. She didn't once complain or indicate she was in pain, even when she was covered in shampoo, so I think she can't have been hurt too bad. Or she's a badass.

It's too bad she won't put two and two together and learn to avoid wherever she got into.