The dog does sympathy...

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, the knee is still being treated.  Sigh.

This means chiro once a week, not too much exercise, and an ice-pack followed by heat twice a day.  It's pretty dull.  Swimming front crawl is allowed (and is good) so that's still going on.

Taking Happy Running Dog for a run is not an option, and walking more than a couple of kilometres isn't really on the cards either.  However, we have discovered a new 'walk' that gives us both plenty of entertainment... a Ball Walk!  Here's how it goes:

We take a tennis ball (ok, that was fairly obvious)

We head for the field, or the woods, or wherever.  Somewhere close...

I hide the ball.  Happy Running Dog has to sit (or lie) still while I go and hide the ball.  I've got increasingly sneaky and have been known to hide it two foot off the ground in a tree.

Then I go back to Happy Running Dog, who is by now utterly beside herself with excitement, but still sitting or lying where she started (bless).  I say the magic words 'Go Get!' and she's off.  She's got a brilliant nose (a human has about 5 million scent glands - a dog has anything between 125 to 300 million) so after a bit of running in mad circles, she narrows the area where it could be down, runs in smaller circles and then - BINGO - she finds the ball.  And we do it again.  And again...

When it was half term week we were doing this in the local park (think 'wild woodland' rather than 'benches and flowerbeds') when an elderly gent and his two grandchildren walked close by.  They asked what Happy Running Dog was doing and I explained.  The two little lads were entranced and said 'Can we have a go?'  So after she'd found the ball and brought it back, they took it round the corner and hid it.  I sort of lost track of time and it was only when she began to struggle to find it that I realised she'd been playing hunt the ball for over half an hour.  She was sooooooooo tired!  It seems that mental exercise wears her out as much as, if not more than, just running around.

She's also VERY sympathetic to the whole 'icing the knee' thing.  As the knee damage is mostly at the back of my knee, the most effective position is to lie flat on the floor on my stomach with the ice pack tied to my knee.

So she helps.

And yes, that's a cat helping too.