This is Elmo, or as I call him these days, Blackbeard. He's had a rough few months. He's on the old side, and he's been steadily going deaf and blind for a while. But about a month ago, something evil happened to his left eye - it got all huge and bulbous, visibly bugging out of his wee little head, and when you shined a light on it, it was obvious that something had gone very wrong somewhere within.
We took him to the vet. I was afraid it was going to be one of those "Well, it's time to think about putting him down" sorts of things, but the vet sent us to a veterinary eye doctor, who said "Oh, heck, we'll just take that nasty old thing out and he'll be fine." And he IS. The eye is gone, of course, and he's pretty much fully blind, but he's happy, he eats like a horse, and he's almost doubled his weight. Plus he looks like a pirate. Yarrrr. What's not to like about that? (He always greetings me when I get home from work by racing around in circles and barking, but now he isn't sure where I am - he still races around in circles and barks, but he can't tell where I'm at and whirls in front of the TV, or the refrigerator, or a chair... It's funny and kind of sad at the same time, but I'm glad he's still around anyway.)
The timing was bad, though. We were going on a family cruise to Alaska, and he had to have his eye out about four days before we left. He was still wearing the Cone of Shame when we left, and nobody likes to see a dog so encumbered.
The cruise was excellent. I'll have more to say about that later, I'm sure, but let's just say for now that it's made a committed cruise-a-holic out of me.
Where have I been, you ask? Beats me. Th easy answer is "I ran out of things to say", but that's crap, because while I've been away, I wrote a (bad) novel about narcotics trafficking, and a (bad) semi-autobiographical memoir of chemotherapy and cancer, and have been working on a (bad) light history of Rome, especially the transition from republic to empire. So it wasn't like I ran out of things to say; I just stopped posting them.
