It’s starting to feel a little bit wintry. I finally had to get my coat out of the closet.
Home Again
Ice Pack Time
Ear up!
Meds Schedule
Frances is home again. She had a rough day. I expected the second surgery to be more difficult for her, because there was so little recovery time after the first one. She’s doing great, considering.
Unfortunately the vet found a totally unrelated tumor on her vulva, when they were prepping her for surgery. They did a FNA, which contained mast cells. We won’t know for sure what it is until the histopathology report comes back, but it’s likely a mast cell tumor. Hopefully we caught it early and the vet got good margins, because mast cell tumors are malignant.
Because of that, she’s on two extra meds this time: Pepcid and Benadryl. Mast cell tumors cause increased histamine and stomach acid production.
In retrospect, I should have suspected there was something else wrong, because Frances has been itchy. She’s also done a lot of nighttime lip smacking the last week or so, which I ought to have realized meant her stomach was upset. Hindsight is 20/20, right?
The Big Day
Fourteen Days Post-op
The sutures and staples came out this morning. The vet said the incision looked good, so the second surgery is a go. They’ll call me when they’re finished with her, and assuming everything goes well, I’ll be able to pick her up tomorrow.
Thirteen Days Post-op
Frances gets her staples and sutures out tomorrow. If all goes well–and I don’t foresee any problems, but who knows with this dog?–she’ll also be having her second surgery to remove the rest of her mammary tumors.
I’ll be really glad to have this all over and done with.
Hydrangea
There are a bunch of hydrangea bushes with dried, dead flowers in front of the student health center. They’re kind of interesting.
Eleven Days Post-op
Her incision keeps looking better and better. And while she hates the cone with the heat of ten thousand suns, she isn’t letting it get in the way of her begging.
Musical Interlude
More Songs for Margaret by Cotton Jones
This came up on the Magical iPod a few days ago, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.
Toad in a Hole
My brother reminded me that we used to have toad in a hole when we were kids, so I made some for breakfast. Or more like lunch, I guess. What do you call the first meal of the day, when it’s at 3pm?
Metamora
A family friend visited us multiple times over the course of several years and took tons of photos and slides. At some point, he gave them to my mom, and she asked me to scan the slides for her, since I have a slide scanner. This is just a few of the more general photos. These were taken between 1979 and 1980, in Metamora, Indiana.
Below the aqueduct
Foggy canal
Candle Shop (?) and Post Office
Train
Canal and Water Wheel
Canal Days crowds
Canal Days vendors
Canal Days vendors near the mill park
Gristmill interior
Inside our woodworking shop
Me reading
Will of Christian Meineke
I’ve gradually been going through the text file of the database for my old blog and adding those entries. It may seems silly, since blogs are ephemeral, but it’s been helpful. For one thing, I found out that I was missing a big chunk of photos. I’d uploaded them to my website but not to Flickr, and then I lost my entire image database. It’s good to have them on Flickr, too, because you can never have too many back-ups, right?
Tonight I hit a strata of entries where I was doing a lot of genealogical research and was prompted to do another sweep of Ancestry.com for information on my grandpa’s family. I found his great-grandfather’s will, which gave me goosebumps. Also, I now know where and when he died. That has been a dead-end for me for years.
Alsoalsoalso! Sleeping at Last has been on heavy rotation in my life over the last year or so. He’s got a new album of Christmas cover songs out, and it’s “pay what you want” via Noise Trade. I’m not a huge holiday music fan (or a huge holiday anything fan, to be honest), but if you’re looking for something new and seasonal to listen to, check it out.
red paper boat 