First things first; so what have the dogs been up to?

Dogs like Cheetos. In fact, I’m pretty sure this dog likes Cheetos more than we do.

Sam likes thumbs from leather gloves. I caught him before he ate the whole thing. I’m not joking about eating it; either he ate the thumb, or he’s really good at hiding stuff.

We had some light snow back in December. Some canid not a domestic dog left its tracks on the road. I suspect a fox. Look at the shadow to Zoe’s left. It’s not Zoe’s shadow. That’s Sam, best known for blue eyes and big, erect ears.

We had some nice days, too, sunny and warm, but not too warm, well suited for lounging for a few minutes. I hardly ever sit down in the grass of our front yard, so Sam was a little concerned. He also wanted pets.

Zoe invited a few Doberman friends over for a friendly game of poker.

Dobermans do not play poker. This is an image generated by an application called wall-e 2, which uses some kind of AI to generate images based on a simple instruction. The instruction for this image was “doberman pinchers playing poker in the style of Normal Rockwell.”

Actually, Zoe does play poker, but for her, poker means “poke her”, which she plays with the cat using her nose.

Speaking of weather (or were we?), something woke me up just at dawn a few days ago and I was able to see the sunrise. It was nice.

I hear that the sun rises almost every day, and often it’s quite picturesque. Maybe some day I will go to bed early enough to get up and see more of them.

Afternoons can offer nice skies, too.

Look at the evidence of wind shear, waves going two different directions. The sky over the parking lot was about all that our local Walmart had to offer, given the continuing supply chain problems.

Oh, about that doctor visit.

I went to my vascular specialist on Thursday of last week to talk about pulmonary embolisms, or blood clots as I don’t like to call them. Since my clots were not explained by any of the normal causes or risk factors, the various physicians I have dealt with have mentioned that cancer often causes blood clots. My vascular specialist repeated that, and added that in 10-to-20 percent of cases of unexplained pulmonary embolisms, cancer is diagnosed within two years.

I went home after that because it seemed like the best place to go. I considered not telling Leah what the doctor said, because I knew she would worry. I was right about that. I told her not to worry, and that, while I was considering potential courses of action should I be diagnosed with cancer, that was not the same thing as worrying. I spoke to my primary care doctor the next day, and he was more reassuring. He said that a cancer that was advanced to the point of causing blood clots would almost certainly be causing other symptoms, of which I had none.

The main concern at this point was that imaging of my chest right after my blood clots had found a nodule in my lung. Doctors said that it was small and did not show some typical features of a cancer, so it was probably benign. But not definitely.

I told Leah that we should hold off on the worrying until I saw the pulmonary specialist on Thursday of this week. I had a CT scan last Friday in preparation for that appointment to see whether the nodule had grown, which would be bad, or was the same, which would be good. The pulmonary specialist told me it had not changed in the six months since the previous CT scan. So, good news. In fact, he said it was probably not really a “nodule” but rather an enlarged lymph node possibly from a past infection, or something.

He said, “You do not have cancer.”

But the mention of an infection causing the enlarged lymph node made me wonder. About 10 years ago I had some heart function problems that were potentially pretty serious. A few months after that was diagnosed, my heart functions had recovered to the point that one of the two cardiologists I had seen discharged me. I asked what had caused my problem and why had it essentially cleared up. The cardiologist said he didn’t know, but that it might have been some kind of infection. So I asked my pulmonary specialist if the enlarged lymph node could have been caused by the same thing that caused my heart problem. He said it certainly could have been.

The doctor wants me to have another CT scan in a year, just to be sure, although the radiologist who read the CT image said there was no need for more imaging.

When I drove back home I felt as if a weight I didn’t realize I had been carrying had been lifted from my shoulder. I felt pretty good. When’s the last time you felt that good after leaving a doctor’s office?