Me & My friend P6

P6 (or kennel club full name: GE LOGIQ™ P6 Vet) was the one that found the source of Flash's pain last Friday. It was on demonstration test that day but as it was still there today, perhaps they bought it. Wonder if Flash gets a commission for providing such a large shaved area and letting a whole hoard of onlookers view his innards.

Late afternoon, took Flash over to the vets for a wound dressing change. They rechecked his heart/lungs after the epileptic type fit on Saturday but again couldn't see or hear any problems. BC's can apparently be sensitive to certain pain killing drugs, particularly after anaesthetics. Let's hope it was a one-off.

The day was relatively good. Tried to act "normally" and go about business as usual, Flash following me around doing all those tasks he feels responsible for but without any real "oomph". He accepted being locked indoors when Luna & I took off for the morning walk. We were gone for nearly 2 hours but on returning he didn't even bother to get up to greet us. Then as always we had lunch together and he had his usual afternoon nap while I removed 13 fresh ticks from Luna, 12 of them still crawling about looking for a cosy spot - the one that had attached itself looked pretty dead. Maybe the Frontline is having some effect. Seems it's going to be a bumper year for them.

Then off to the vets, Flash pleased to be in the car. All went well, he did twitch when the 30cm long plaster was removed from his tummy but was otherwise totally relaxed as can be seen in the Blip, waiting for the vet to come in. Infusion needle was removed from his leg. He is still being good at not licking his wound but I suspect the itching will now get worse.

When we got home, Angie was there and it was as if one had pulled a switch. He went into quite another mode and beaming out a quite different personality. Mum's will know what I mean - all day fighting with grumpy children and then Daddy comes home to be greeted by his bubbling, excited, perfectly behaved angels.

Luna was great all day, enjoying the solo attention. Angie took her out for a ride in the evening before Flash & I got back and that eases the pressure on me enormously.

As Angie has written in her journal - thank you so very much for all your best wishes messages.

I think I need to get back into full Blip life. By chance last week, while checking up on some environment news on the Guardian newspaper online site (they tend to do quite a bit on bees), I read an article about UK governments financial programme for biomass heating and unusually for me, thought I would comment with a factual report on our experience with wood pellets. I didn't express any views, other than say I could recommend it if one has space. My comment was picked out & highlighted by the Guardian staff, got 80 odd recommendations -  I was a bit chuffed. Someone replied with a nice bit on Bavarian heating of old. Then came the two line punch, line two reading "how many people have you made sick and killed?".

I do actually understand and accept the concerns but was amazed at the aggression and on looking into the writer's history, the lack of any positive contribution to the debate. If this is the standard for a "serious" newspaper site, I think I will restrict my ventures in to social networking to FB (where several friends are and I can keep up to date on them) and Blip, where over a number of years, I have never seen a negative comment, a reflection on the way that the members respect each other even though they probably often disagree on some of the content.

PS Daily Rant

A word on the current energy debate,  also here in Germany where renewables are causing lots of problems, not least because the move to renewables has been so popular that consumers now have to pay highest prices ever, despite excess capacity and the generating (wholesale) price at it's lowest ever. I don't exclude nuclear energy from the long list of possible energy sources. Like every single other source it has it's side effects and for me, they are at the moment outside the range of "manageable". Solar seems like a winner if we can find a storage solution and find ways of the equipment not bringing all sorts of other problems. I even sympathise with the view that the best contribution I could make to global warming, would be to restrict my Blip entries to two lines and thereby save on huge CPU running & storage costs!