Charlie grows up

Charlie, part 2

One of the big highlights of the year was actually having vacation time and enough spare change to take a vacation on my own. I love my family, but the fact that I was able to enjoy almost a week at the beach without them was grand. My endlessly cheerful aunt and uncle were gone too, so there were a couple of days when Ms. Packratty only got out of her PJs to go swimming and walk Charlie.

Charlie was entranced by two things at the beach. One was the IMMENSE pine cones shed by many, many pine trees- there were so many he had trouble making up his mind which one he wanted to pick up and carry about. Here is a picture of Charlie with one cone about as big as his head. OK, it's blurry, but Ms. Packratty was laughing her fanny off at the moment.














The other object of Charlie's affections was the golf cart. After coaxing him up onto it once, Ms. Packratty discovered that she had created a monster. No matter when Charlie was taken outside - midnight, 6 a.m., high noon, he ever after assumed that it meant he would get to go for a ride. If a ride did not appear to be forthcoming, he would go leap into the cart as if to encourage his prospects - as the picture below shows:
















There was no success in getting a picture of Charlie at the beach. He learned to swim, but liked it best when he was firmly on lead and headed out to the big sand bar at low tide. The need to keep him under some control until onto the sand bar limited Ms. Packratty's swimming - also because there is a very firm limit on the amount of time the Packratty dermis can be exposed to the sun without turning a rather lobsterish hue. All in all, and despite arriving to find the AC was off and struggling for what felt like hours to get it working, it wasn't a bad trip.

The other big event for Charlie was meeting his cousin Caroline. He has not yet met his cousin Charles Here's a picture of Charlie and Caroline:
















For the anniversary of Charlie's "gotcha" day, he made a new friend. The mail lady is definitely not afraid of a happy Westie.


And that's my year with Charlie.