Sunny Seeds and Shots

I couldn't resist another sunflower photo. Look at all those little seeds in the center, just waiting to become a meal for hungry birds! I'm glad we have something to feed them in the coming weeks and months. You may remember we took down our bird feeders in the spring after we spotted rodent activity in the yard, and since then I've noticed that the tits and dunnocks that normally populate our garden have moved on. Maybe between the sunflowers, the purple verbena and the teasels, we can bring some birds back to feast on natural seeds.

Dave and I have clashed a bit over the bird feeders, actually. Now that we're starting to move into autumn I'd like to put them back out again, and Dave is dead against it. "We'll get rats," he said. My response is, "This is London. We already HAVE rats."

Besides, I really think the rat activity we saw in the spring came more from Mrs. K's compost bin than from our bird feeders, and she's removed it. I told him I'm happy to give up the suet feeder, which is the messiest. I put one peanut feeder back out, and I may put up a seed feeder too. I'm not sure what to do with all the suet balls we have.

Thanks for all your good wishes on yesterday's post. This is what greeted me when I came home at lunch yesterday to check on Olga. You can see her snout is still a bit swollen from the surgery, but it should shrink over time. She's back to her playful self and still toting around her Kong. In fact she insisted I throw it for her.

She's a machine! So much so that I told her dog walker to pick her up today as usual. I simply asked him to keep her from chewing anything hard, like sticks, and transport her in her own crate rather than putting her with other dogs. (She usually gets driven in a van to the Heath, where she walks. That's why she's in a crate part of the time.)

I think the sooner she gets back to her routines, the better. Meanwhile she's on an antibiotic and a pain reliever, and though the vet gave us three cans of special easily-digestible food, she doesn't seem to need it. We've been giving her normal food too and it doesn't bother her. The only thing we have temporarily discontinued is Dentastix -- they're just too hard for her newly-sutured mouth. Dave will take her back to the vet this afternoon for a checkup, and I'm sure she will go enthusiastically because the vet has treats!

Oh, and I got my seasonal Covid booster yesterday. This was a total spur-of-the-moment thing. I just learned there's a walk-in vaccination centre on Mill Lane, near our flat. I was thinking my last booster was about a year ago (it was actually in early November, but whatever) so I seemed to be due for another, and I wanted to get one before my trip to Florida to see my mom early next month. So I showed up at the vaccination centre and although walking in didn't seem as easy as one would expect (lots of people had appointments and they rightfully got priority) I did eventually get a shot. So that's out of the way.

I got Moderna. My last booster was Pfizer, and my original vaccines were AstraZeneca. I'm a veritable stew of Covid antibodies!