If I had been paying attention I would have noticed that in May Blogger added the capability to link a picture in the page layout to a URL. I had been trying to do this a couple of months ago and couldn't figure out why I couldn't do it. Well, apparently it was not a capability at that time. But now it is so I've added a picture with a link to the Free Rice website. It's a really cool word game, the more you win the more free rice is distributed to hungry people around the world. It's a lot of fun and I'd love it if you'd play a game or two. Educational and philanthropic all at once! Doesn't get better than that, does it?
Well we took Bear back to the ophthalmologist last Saturday. From our first visit I had understood that the hope was that his tear glands would repair themselves once we stopped the sulfa medication and started giving him the
cyclosporine. I misunderstood, though, and found out this time that this repair is highly unlikely. The hope really is that the
cyclosporine will do the job of stimulating his tear ducts enough so that he won't need the other medication he's on and won't need to switch to another type of medication. I had run out of the
cyclosporine the day before the visit so didn't give him his dose the morning of his visit so really we weren't able to tell if it was working or not. Disappointing. We go back in July and I'll be sure to give him the dose that morning. To be honest, I'm also miffed at our regular vet. On the whole I like them very much but I'm frustrated that we took Bear to them twice with dry eye symptoms (at the time we didn't know what the problem was) and neither time was the possibility of dry eye mentioned. It is not an uncommon side effect of the sulfa drug so I would have hoped that 1. before we started the sulfa med, the vet would have told us to watch out for symptoms of dry eye and 2. once we brought him in with symptoms, that would have been the first thing they considered. Neither happened and now it looks like Bear will have to be on some sort of medication for the dry eye for the rest of his life. Frustrating.
The lesson learned, though, is that you can't be too careful when it comes to doctors and vets. I'm not saying that you should be paranoid but I think it is our responsibility to investigate and ask questions. If we had asked the vet if there were side effects to the sulfa med or had looked it up on line ourselves, we might have avoided this trouble.
Raining today. It's a nice gentle rain which the ground will love. The grass seed we planted in the front yard is germinating and is almost as tall as the other grass. With all the snow we had this winter our front lawn took a little bit of a beating. Not bad but in the spots where a lot of salt and sand was mixed in with the snow piles some of it died. This rain will really help the seed we planted fill in those spots.
My first roses bloomed two days ago and the wild iris down by our stream are out, too. I'll get out there and take some pictures when the rain stops. It's supposed to be almost 90 degrees this weekend and I think that will really make the roses pop!
The Sunday before Memorial Day, I. and I went to a former Army base in the area. There is a small military cemetery on the grounds that I've wanted to walk through on a Memorial Day. We took advantage of the perfect weather this year and made the trip. Most of those interred there are family members of service men and women who were stationed at the base. We noticed a number of twin infants from the 1950's and 1960's buried there, from before the time of the
NICU and other methods of saving tiny babies. There are also several graves of
POW's from WWII, mainly German but one Italian. I wondered if there families knew that they were here. Also, graves from former outposts in Boston Harbor were relocated to this cemetery and so there are Civil War veterans buried here as well. It was meaningful to me to remember all of these people - family, former enemies, and unknown soldiers from ancient wars - who make up the warp and weft of the textile of our country. Their sacrifices are meaningful and are worth honoring.
We picked up our second box today and I'm hoping that with being on vacation this coming week, I'll be better about eating up what we got. I did end up using most of the first box except for the strawberries which were not good looking when we picked them up. Plus my mom brought over a tray of beautiful strawberries which were far better looking than the CSA berries and were delicious. I found this berry in the tray from my mom. Looks just like a heart to me! Sorry for the poor lighting, I was taking it at night with just the overhead light in the kitchen for light.
Just also wanted to show you a picture of the largest scallop I have ever seen. We had dinner at a local restaurant, one of the nicest in the area I think. Besides being perfectly done and delicious, the scallops were huge! I apologize again for the picture quality. Not sure what I was doing wrong here but you can get the general idea.
