I’ve started my own dog sitting business and wow, it’s tough. I’m in my late sixties and I’ve loved border collies since I was a young boy back in the ‘50s. I grew up with a border collie, and then when I turned eighteen I bought two. I used to skip church with my mum on a Sunday morning to walk my dogs on the beach. She thought that I was going to another church with my girlfriend at the time, but I was looking after the things that I loved most. Once my two dogs passed away, I said to myself that I wouldn’t get another dog until I was married with kids. So, as soon as my daughter was born I got a border collie puppy… because why not! We used to feed my daughter her breakfast and then our puppy her breakfast like a production line. But anyway, I digress.
The point of this blog post is that I’m well versed in looking after border collies. But that was before I got old and I suffered from fungal nail infections. In the Cheltenham area, there are plenty of places to go to get stuff like this checked out, but I never bothered. I’m a ‘head in the sand’ type of person. I like to hope that these sorts of things will just go away but as with everything, my fungal infection didn’t. I should have gotten on top of the common foot conditions. In Melbourne, we have a great health care system and I had every possible resource to get my infection fixed. But I didn’t and now I’m paying for it.
I’m struggling to keep up with the dogs. I can’t run after them like I used to be able to. I specialise in looking after young puppies and so they have more energy than I had in my prime at eighteen. The business is getting pretty lucrative though and so I think I can afford to hire another person to help me look after the dogs. During feeding time is when I need the most help.