The Infinite and the Immediate

A lot has been going on. It has not been a good weekend by any stretch of the imagination. It started out ok, in that I figured out how to use my camera for night photography. The neat thing about taking long exposure shots is that the camera tends to pick up stuff that the eye does not. A whole extra skyful of stars, for example:



That's after leaving the shutter open for just 10 seconds. Here's what you get if you leave it open for about 5 minutes:



And who would have thought that you could get lens flare from the moon? It was especially bright:



But the most amazing thing was this:



I thought of someone special when I saw it, and yes, I did make a wish.

That was Saturday. Sunday was terrible. Several bad things happened, but the worst was what happened to this little girl:



She's been sick for a few years now - she has something called Addison's Disease, which requires medication, and she started having seizures maybe a year ago. This afternoon, she had a massive seizure. I held her and patted her for a few hours afterward, but she still had tremors all down her right side, and she couldn't stand up. I took her to the emergency vet this evening, and she had another seizure in the car, and then another one in the examination room.

She's there now, lying in a cage, hooked up to a valium IV and feeling no pain. They took x-rays and found a growth on her sternum. It could be an arthritic growth, or it could be cancerous. They won't know until tomorrow, and they're talking about MRIs and bone marrow problems, and blood transfusions. I just want to know if she'll be able to walk. If she'll be able to greet me at the door with a smile on her face, wiggling her butt at me.

Taking care of her is expensive and time consuming, but I can't imagine not doing it. I've been doing it for so long now that having that gap in my day would just about kill me.

So if you have a moment, spare a thought for little Maisie the Dog. She can use all the help she can get.