Mol would like to thank her public, the stats dream is over, bubbles and hoverflies.

Mol would like to thank her public for all their good wishes and sympathy.

She has improved quite literally by leaps and bounds in 24 hours, as Emy the vet predicted but as it was hard to believe yesterday when she was sore and woozy and wobbly, though she clattered upstairs to bed energetically enough.  She had a good night's sleep, woke us with a racket as she scooted, bucket and  all, under the bed and out the other side at about 6 am, clattered down the stairs for a pee and then clattered up them again to insist on joining us on the bed for a lie-in, which after the long and gruelling day yesterday we all appreciated.

The bucket is irksome, as it really is a very big one, bigger than was required for her ears since she can't be allowed to get anywhere near the stitches, and she's worked out how she can get to her back paws even so.  She's still amazingly good about it, and after a trip in the car and a short walk in the arboretum this morning, she was allowed to be free of it for a trot down the road this evening, which she enjoyed.  The scar looks a bit alarming and long, Emy took out the neighbouring lymph glands to be on the safe side, but running the length of her body rather than across it, it's not as troublesome as it might be. She really is running and jumping again already, and doesn't seem to be in any pain, just sometimes uncomfortable when she's sitting around, but that might be the bucket, or thirst - she needs to drink a lot, but doesn't always realise that's what she needs - or her insides settling down again.  She's on painkillers and antibiotics, and the stitches out in a fortnight.   She's eating like a horse and I'm quite sure she's enjoying barging the back of our legs with the bucket for attention.  She sometimes needs to flop and sleep in a cool quiet dark place after a burst of being up and about and up for anything.

She had a small drip bandage on her front leg which Emy said we could take off any time, but Mol wouldn't tolerate me getting anywhere near it - she never trusts me around her paws.  This evening she snuggled up next to Tom on the sofa as is her wont, and later when I came by, he held out the bandage, which he had quietly worked off without a murmur from her.

Submitting an animal for surgery is a difficult thing to do.  You can't explain to them why it's happening and what the alternatives are, they can't explain to you how they're feeling.  You have to abandon them for the duration.  We said we wouldn't put her through anything like that again, but when it came to it this seemed like the better choice, and seeing how bravely she's coping with it and how well she's recovering, and how ready she is for a good few years more life, we're confident, fingers crossed, that we've done the right thing.

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Stats are back to normal, a star is not born in me, nor in you, if you're on Blogger and were getting delusions of grandeur.  They finally explained that it was indeed some blogroll widget erroneously registering as pageviews.  The moral is, as we keep saying, do it for the love of it and for your real friends, not for the stats.

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We like the new computer.  We like Windows 7.  We especially like a new screensaver which comes with it which generates a random image of translucent bubbles which bounce around and off each other and change colour, and simply overlay rather than replacing the display below.

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Now for some hoverflies.  The small-, purple-flowered* container plant whose name I have forgotten again seems to be a hoverfly magnet, it is alive with scores of them all the time when it's dry.  Hoverflies are wonder-insects, they pollinate everything, their larvae eat baddies like aphids, they look cute, they don't sting and they don't live in the stonework of your house.  So the more the merrier, I reckon.

* that's a German punctuational trick, that repeated hyphen for two compound words with the same second element, it doesn't really exist in English but it should, so I use it.