Sunday morning

It's a little before 8 am Sunday morning. Everyone else is in bed. I love this time, when I have only the Lord and me. I was reading my last few blogs where the weather had been consistently -30 or colder for weeks on end. Thankfully, this weekend it has warmed up to a balmy -10, and we've really been enjoying the relief. Lloyd and Bram went out snowmobiling and snowshoeing yesterday. We had bought Bram snowshoes for his birthday, but it had really been too cold to try them out. He says they work really well and are cool.

This past week I had a special piano lesson from Boris Konovolov. He's a concert pianist who lives in Edmonton and comes to Yellowknife once a year to give a series of concerts and to give private lessons to advanced students. So I was frantically trying to squeeze in a few more minutes of practice here and there on the two pieces I had decided to play, and when the actual lesson came, things went very well. I was surprised - first of all because the poor girl who had her lesson right before me didn't have a good lesson; things didn't go very well for her at all, and he wasn't very patient with her. However, he was very nice for me, and some of the spots that I always struggle with and consistently make mistakes on - I didn't. That was nice. (It's kind of weird to think of myself as an advanced student though - I don't think so). I have two weeks now to decide (along with my piano teacher) if I'm going to be ready to register to take my exam in June or not. I think that means that I can't let up on the practicing yet. (Probably not until June.)

Our dog, Pepsi has had a growth on her back right foot for some time now. It hasn't been getting any smaller and finally Lloyd and Bram took her into the vet. (This was really generous of Lloyd because he doesn't believe in paying money to a vet, but I was double booked with the piano lesson with Boris.) Anyway, by this time, it looks like a dark pink marble (not a small marble, the biggest ones). The vet looked at it, declared that he didn't know what it could be and that he'd like to take a biopsy of it and send it down to Edmonton. The biopsy would cost $300. We'd just like to have the thing removed, but he didn't think he could do that without a biopsy first - the surgery would cost more on top of that.

So Lloyd brought Pepsi back home, and that evening we cut the growth off ourselves. I was really doubtful about the whole thing - but with the dog tied down and Bram securing her, we sprayed the foot with a topical anaesthetic, then Lloyd took a pair of really sharp scissors and chopped it off. (Pepsi yelped at that point, but was really good through the whole procedure.) It didn't bleed hardly at all, and now, two days later, it's dry and we don't even have it bandaged. It doesn't seem to bother her at all anymore. She used to spend quite a bit of time licking her foot and the growth there, but now she ignores it. We'll have to see if it grows back now or what.