box elder

Philadelphus (top left, bottom right) is perhaps my favourite shrub, or even flower.  The ferns I'd photographed before when they were just fiddle heads, but I never got around to posting the pictures, now they're all unfurled. The pond and its water lilies never cease to beguile.  This year I have seen huge water beetles, including a mating pair, and small ones, tadpoles of course, and newts, and many damsel flies laying eggs, and also the strange ghostly empty shells of their nymphs which have crawled out, hatched and flown. We still haven't finished the small 'secret' garden, where all these things are, but the pond  has matured and is home to many things, and I can spend ages kneeling on the warm slabs beside it watching the life of it going on beneath.  The philadelphus is in the same corner as a rampant patch of sweet cicely, so with the combination of anise and bubble gum perfumes it smells like a sweet shop.

The new big laptop computer arrived very quickly from the UK.  I started setting it up and was frustrated that it simply wouldn't connect to the wi-fi.  It kept telling me to turn it on with a switch or a function key, and I could find neither.  I'd not had this difficulty with any other machine.  I contacted the supplier, who said try another function key - I'd tried them all - then told me to contact the manufacturer's tech support.  Their UK line was permanently engaged but I got the French one, who said use an ethernet cable you should have one with the Livebox...

I didn't have one so I rang the worthy and ever patient James, everybody's favourite computer doctor from down the road, who arrived bearing said cable, went through all the business but still no connection, picked up the computer and pointed out a very small switch with a wireless symbol on it on the front, which in my numbskullness I had completely failed to see.  Prat.

James said he's seen worse, like the woman in Loudeac who kicked her computer in a fit of pique, sent him to fetch all manner of gubbins from St Brieuc in the other direction to repair it, only for him to find that her coup de pied had accidentally turned it off, and all that was required was to turn it back on again.  He'd only accept a bottle of brown beer from the micro-brewery from us for his trouble.

Which has kind of served a little to distract from the main worry of the moment.  When Mol went for her haircut last week the groomer noticed a lump which she said was probably a mammary tumour, and advised getting Emy the vet to look at it.  We went yesterday, and Emy said best have it out now; it's a simple operation which done now will probably mean she will live to her normal span, whereas to leave it would be a risk, even if it isn't malignant.  Emy does these ops routinely, it's a common problem with bitches of a certain age, and she says people are usually surprised how quickly and well their dogs recover, it's nothing like as difficult and painful as the ear surgery of a few years ago. Mol's heart is strong and good, she said, which we could have told her, of course.

She'll have to wear a bucket on her head again for a couple of weeks, to stop her getting at the stitches.  At least the weather's not hot, she's cool and clean with her new haircut, and we don't have much in the way of other commitments for a couple of weeks now.

Even so, for all this looking on the bright side, it's a worry. We aren't looking forward to tomorrow, when she's going in, and we'll be glad when it's over.