Home From Russia

Hello Everyone,

I`m home at last, well I have been since Saturday but I`ve had so much to do I didn`t get a chance to go online until today. I had a wonderful and truly memorable holiday in St.Petersburg, the most amazing place I`ve ever visited. I call it a city of contraditions because just when you think one thing, something else happens to make you think another. The city itself is beautiful, the buildings are magnificent as is the river Neva with it`s many bridges.

Anyway, I`ll come to that later when in a series of entries I`ll tell you all about our adventures in Russia.. Firstly I hope you like the photos I took of our visit to the Hermitage, now a museum that holds many treasures from all over the world but was, at one time the Winter Palace of the Tsars. It was the place where Tsar Nicholas II at his family where arrested in the October Revolution in 1917. There is little mention of the Romanovs anywhere in St.Petersburg today, perhaps it`s just something they don`t want to be reminded of.

We arrived home to a worried phone call from our friends who looked after Jake while we were away. They had to rush him to the vet on Saturday morning as his face and throat had swollen up suddenly and he was very subdued. The vet thought he`d been stung and gave him antihistimine and antibiotic injections and the swelling went down somewhat. However, it has gone down completely and he is still not his normal self and after seeing the vet this afternoon it was thought he needs a small operation to see what`s going on in there. It looks very much like the lump Hannah had in her jaw when she was diagnosed with cancer but the vet is hopeful that it`s not that. I can`t somehow believe that two dogs could get the same very rare disease but it`ll be much better once we know for sure.

I went back to work today and spent a good part of the day putting bird tables together, not something you do every day but it passes the time...lol! The rain has certainly not kept customers away as much as I thought but there were certainly less of them than usual. It seems hard to believe that it is high summerwith all the rain and low temperatures that we`re having. Apparently it will be like this until the 15th July....how the forecastors know that I have no idea!

Anyway, my friends. I`ll say goodbye for now though I`ll be back tomorrow with the first entry about my holiday with more photos.  Night Night. :o)