Updates, a candy challenge and my new robotic fingers

Good morning to you all, I hope everyone is OK.

I'm not sure where to start really, I know lots of you are waiting to hear updates on Buffy's health and I really must thank you all for your wonderfully kind comments and e-mails. I's been a very difficult week and will tell you a little more about her shortly and also what brings me back to blogland quicker than I anticipated.

As you all know I have sight and dexterity issues associated with my MS and lately leaving comments have been really hard……… I'm sure many of you have seen some of my atrocious spelling.......believe it or not I can actually spell, it's just that my fingers and head don't work as a team ! 

But I think I found a solution in the form of a word recognition program, I've been looking at the system for weeks and decided eventually it had to be worth a go, so yesterday my delivery arrived from Amazon. I've got the Dragon 11.5 Premium system and so far I have to say it seems quite awesome, it took all of half an hour to install and run through the voice recognition process and last night I spent some time sending e-mails to test it all out. And this is my very first post using the system, so expect a few errors until it gets to fully recognise my voice…… but I literally have to just sit here and talk into a little microphone and the type appears before my eyes….… how clever is that. Needless to say I'm now wondering why it took me so long to get round to buying it.

Now I will tell you a little bit about Buffy, we went back to the vet's this morning and things are much the same as last week, her breathing is still laboured due to what they believe are secondaries in her chest and the mass around her spleen creating an ongoing infection. She has been on antibiotics for two weeks now but her temperature remains very high. If she was younger than eleven and a half they would undoubtedly operate, but they believe she's too poorly to consider that so it's very much taking it a day at a time and she remains on antibiotics, but she is coming off them at the weekend as having them on a permanent basis will create it's own problems so I guess the telling time will be early next week. The vet assured us that she is not in pain and while she remains relatively perky and interested in life and especially food, we will carry on and play it by ear.

Last week when we learnt how ill she was I have to confess to have been totally shell shocked, we knew she was poorly but never for a moment expected to be so bad and coupled with my own health issues felt I had to take a break. But the reality is that Buffy is so used to laying with me either in my office or craft room  it's better to keep things as normal as possible. So that really was what prompted me to finally go for the word recognition system.

So why all the pictures of poppies I hear you ask, well I love poppies and know lots of you do as well and this year seems to be a brilliant year for them, perhaps they're the only ones that really enjoyed this rain for days on end. Each time we've gone across the Fen to the vets this last couple of weeks I meant to take my camera but kept forgetting, but this morning I remembered and thought I would share with you just how beautiful the dykes and verges are looking around here at the moment........for those of you who have never been to the Fens you can see just how flat our landscape is, but also very beautiful with crops as far as the eye can see. We live just to the left on the top picture give or take a field  or two. As you'll see, not too many neighbours and nobody pops in on their way past by chance because most of the roads are just dirt tracks leading to fields.

And because I know so many of you love poppies I thought I would have a little challenge of my own by inviting you all to come up with your own take on all these beautiful photos, be it a card or piece of artwork bursting with poppies, a single poppy or if you don't have a poppy stamp why not use the beautiful colour of the poppies to colour your favourite image.

All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning the gift voucher above, is make your piece of artwork, post it on your own blog and add it to Inlinkz below, you can even lift the logo and use if you want. 

Let's see how it goes and I will let it run until 31st July by which time I should hopefully have got my act together properly. Have fun everyone and coming round visiting your cards is going to give me the perfect opportunity to test this new word verification system properly.