Spring flowers and Buster's eye

It’s warming up here, due to be in the mid 80’s the rest of the week (28c), but predictions have a storm front moving in over the weekend with temps dropping to 70 (21c) and rain on Sunday. The normal high for this time of year is supposed to be 69, so it is nice to have a little warmer time. I am ready for summer, I love the heat, and would much rather have it over 100 than under freezing. Trees that bloom are starting to flower around town, there is one with red leaves and pink flowers that is used a lot in new developments that really looks pretty. There are several areas on my drive home that have rows of these, and at the right angle of the sun they really shimmer a gorgeous pink. We hit the nursery last weekend and found the fruit trees starting to put out blooms


It looks like our big peach tree will not be blooming too much this year, the bloom cycle seems to vary and even though we had a few pink blossoms earlier the tree has now started putting out leaves and turning green. It’s the first tree in our yard to go green, providing some shade already. Out back some daffodils that B and E planted have come up


Also at our place one of our dogs is having problems. Buster - you remember Buster don’t you? He’s the brown guy


He weights about nine pounds and is fairly friendly. We got both Buster and Max from the animal shelter down in San Diego about fifteen years ago, and figure that he’s about 18 or 19 years old. He has been walking slower these days, his hearing is starting to go as well as his vision. At a recent teeth cleaning they pulled nine of his teeth, including all the front ones. It looks like he has a cataract in his right eye, instead of the nice deep brown it used to be it’s kind of milky now, and his night vision is way down. Well, a few weeks ago he scratched his eye somehow (he will not tell us how) and it became infected. Several trips to the vet, pills and liquid and shots did not clear it up. On Thursday the vet tried to clean it out, but it became worse and on Friday they had to take his eye out. (that sounds bad) Unfortunately it was his better eye that was removed, so now we have an almost deaf almost blind dog wandering the house. When not sleeping he’s wandering around in a narcotic haze, we have to be careful not to step on him because he follows the shadowy movement and sneaks up behind us. He has a cone around his head to keep him from scratching at the stitches, which means he can’t make it out the doggy door, so if we don’t see him headed that way it’s more to clean up. We can hear him wandering as the plastic cone scrapes against the walls or bangs into chair legs, at least it protects him from hitting that eye against anything for a while. Fortunately the nice weather has let us keep the doors open, and since we’ve been here almost six years he knows his way around and can make it outside. But at night he can’t see anything in the yard so he does not wander far (we have a big yard).


Yup, doesn’t look too good, does he? With that eye shaved and sewn shut and no teeth up front and a milky eye. When E was told about his operation she said ‘oh, he’s a Cyclops now’, remembering Mike from Monsters Inc.


So it doesn’t bother her too much, and when she gets back down he should be healed up and look a lot better, except his eye won’t be in the middle of his head.