wild animals I have known

in my backyard, eating fruit.

Last year's buck, nicknamed Popeye after he showed up with a lumpy brow and crooked antler (best guess:  an altercation with a motor vehicle) has not been back. Now we have both a young buck who prefers to eat young leaves of apple trees and the flowering tips of broccoli and tomatoes, and a doe who eats pears and the new shoots of the rosemary bush.
The doe is at least a little skittish. The buck on the other hand.... Well, I had just finished folding clothes when he arrived in the back yard, and I attempted to scare him off by picking up the IKEA clothes-drying rack and opening and closing it in a threatening giant-scissors fashion (RRASP! RRRASP!) while walking towards him.
Nothing. He stared blankly at me, oblivious to how much bigger my rack was than his rack. I had to throw windfall Spartans at him to get him moving over to the neighbour's back yard. (Credit to Sina for suggesting that I shout 'This is Spartan!' while doing so.)
 I'm undecided now which I should do. Get a new elastic for my Wrist Rocket slingshot and add some oomph to the Spartans, or look in the attic for Chris's old Supersoakers and keep one by the back door?
No raccoons under the house this year, but Momma and a trio of young ones did come prowling (Momma) and wobbling (young 'uns) along the top of the fence while I was picking blackberries. Momma gave me a growl so I growled back, she for the kits, me for the garden.
A few days later I was sitting in the kitchen with the cat on my lap when a half-grown raccoon wandered in through the open back door. I thought at first it was a neighbour cat (there's a creamsicle-coloured one that came right up the stairs not long ago) but it was awfully leggy for a cat.
I spoke to it. Unlike the deer, it scampered off when spoken to. Our cat remained oblivious on my lap.

Meanwhile the crows clatter around on the roof in a suggestively thuggish fashion, and occasionally descend to accept offerings of catfood (not offered to them originally, but they'll overlook that little misunderstanding. This time.)

So far last year's woodpecker, the one that wanted into the house, hasn't renewed its efforts. There's been one in next-door's oak tree, knocking delicately at outlying branches in rattling concert with one I couldn't see that might have been in the other oak tree cater-corner. I hope it wasn't after some part of the garage.
Here's a damp bee, my one successful capture of a bee in pixels, because normally they move too fast. This one was resting up on a gallica rose just at sunrise, with the look of someone who'd partied all night and wasn't quite sure where he'd woken up.

This increase in wildlife is probably connected with the season of mists and not-so-mellow fruitfulness that's going on. While the Transparent apples are well and truly dealt with, dried and bagged or sauced and frozen, the pears are dropping fast. I've done two dryer loads and a jar of pear sauce (pear butter?) already, and there are two mixing bowls of windfalls still to go.
The blackberries may be done, with only one pie and a large ziplock bag frozen. They looked promising, but perhaps because of the dry summer, most of the berries are small and of the sort that doesn't want to detach from the stem. Oddly, the bushes have swapped qualities this year, with the nice fat berries coming from the bush that last year produced small tight berries.
The young greengage tree produced a crop this year. Are greengages normally the size of cherries? It did make them easier to pit, with my new cherry pitter, but it wasn't going to make much jam. 

Rain, steam and speed

Last weekend: The Victoria Steam Expo.
This was a smaller affair than was hoped, with a horrible flu of some sort taking a number of Seattle guests out of action, and preventing the arrival of the Robot Squid. There were some rather good costumes, naturally, including a steam-driven robotic arm, which we didn't get pics of, and a winged girl, whom we did. I made an attempt at a costume, by digging up the Baron Samedi costume I made for Chris some few Halloweens back (minus the 4 ft tall skull-headed walking stick, because Mark and I biked down to the Empress) and borrowing Mark's vintage welding goggles. (but I must now reference Kate Beaton's 'Brunel is tired of these time-travelling assholes')

Cherie Priest was the guest of honour, and did a Q&A on the Saturday and a reading (from Dreadnought) on the Sunday. After the Q&A she signed books for the quickly-forming line, and after that Mark and I took her up on the 'ask me questions and I will talk' invitation. This ended up on the Verandah of the Empress (because the Bengal Lounge will not let you in if you are wearing a hat. T-shirts are okay, top-hats and turbans not. Hm.) for a couple of hours of writing etc. chat, including the 'seven-year overnight success' story, the 'utterly fortuitous rediscovery by a publisher' story, the 'never go with a micropress' story, the 'my early years of B&E and explorations of deserted buildings' stories. I would've felt guilty for snaffling the GoH, but fortunately Heather was one of the volunteers and chaperoned as well as contributing some great stories of her own to the mix.
See? I am working on the the schmoozing. But I'm only going to do it if it's fun. Which it definitely was, and you can add Cherie Priest to the list (headed by Mary Robinette Kowal) of 'people you should buy a drink/snack for and provide keywords to for hours of entertainment'.
Didn't get a picture of 'me with GoH', but I'm still too Canadian to be other than embarrassed by that suggestion anyways.


Displays & vendors were way out of my pocketbook's range, but I have to mention the Really Awesome Clockwork Trilobite by Randie Feil.

On Sunday there was a talk on Steampunk Archetypes which put me off rather. While I was amused by the theological hairsplitting between steampunk, clockpunk and dieselpunk (apparently you can adapt Victorian/Edwardian fashion as much as you like, but if your imaginary power source is diesel rather than steam or phlogiston, you'd better not call yourself steampunk, hombre), the narrowness of the permissable cultural influences was making me twitch. According to the speaker, the only 'pure' locales were London and the American West. Oh, and parts of the British Empire, if you were an Explorer or Engineer (ie white?).
Um. Yeah.
When questions were permitted I asked if France & Europe were acceptable locales, given that Jules Verne (not from London) was surely one of the founding fathers of Victorian sf? Which point was rather missed in the reply, which was that Verne, yeah, Verne was very important.
Given that K.W. Jeter, Cherie Priest, and Jay Lake (those just off the top of my head) all write stories that deal with the underside of industrial and colonial expansion and have multicultural characters, I hadn't expected this unexamined narrowness--maybe it's more an aspect of the costuming side? The speaker seemed much happier once she got onto weapons-modding.

This weekend: rain and clouds and cold. I've had a fire going most of the day and have moved my laptop into the kitchen for warmth & solace. Working on Cost of Silver with breaks to read Witchfinders: a 17th century English tragedy, by Malcolm Gaskill (narrative nonfic about Hopkins & Stearne). This is not cheerful reading, though engrossing. Gaskill fictionalises a good deal, guessing at motives and background, but as long as one keeps that in mind, I don't think it's a problem.
The thing that's hanging me up with research is trying to get a picture of how the witch fever tied in with the Civil War that was going on at the same time. Not psychologically, because I get that the uncertainty and disruption and privations of war would be a proper breeding ground for fears of intangible malicious influence. But physically, how the witch finders travelled through an England scattered with armed camps that would take passing strangers to be spies, and just how people carried on their lives. I probably need to get Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel: women's lot in 17th century England out again, for that side.
Anyway, I will try not to blather on with historical witchcraft neepery, like how the suckling of familiars is such a particularly English concept, and how the concept of a contract or covenant with the Devil may have developed from the Puritan 'covenant of grace' to become a standard part of witchcraft lore. But I can't resist this anecdote--
Matthew Hopkins asked Elizabeth Clarke in what form the devil had come to her. Clarke retorted: 'A tall, proper, black haired gentleman, a properer man than your selfe.' Asked by Stearne with whom she would rather share a bed, she had no doubt: the devil.

My own particular bedevilment recently is the temptation to (brace yourself for teh stoopid) make a book trailer for Cost of Silver, a book that I haven't even finished yet, to compound the idiocy.
But, but, I have IMovie! I have photographs I took in Suffolk! I have jpgs of copyright-free woodcuts! And my cat runs away from vacuums, so she's no help!
I'm trying instead to channel this impulse for good by working further on the (provisional title) Chimps on a Blimp novel, which is at least writing, not messing around. Also it is steampunk, so I should be all inspired after the Expo. Also I have inspirational music, specifically Navigator by the Pogues, and Rain, Steam and Speed by The Men They Couldn't Hang. So really there is nothing to stop me. Right?


Next weekend: panicked speed as I start on the last (please!) revisions of Willow Knot. Somewhere in the cross-border mail is a packet of the first 200 pages of the mss. marked for trimming and tightening.
I promised I'd have the revisions finished within a month of receiving the pages, so I expect June to be a somewhat distracted month in the run-up to Fort Rodd Hill and our Living History week.
Especially since June includes a trip to the Known World Heraldic Symposium (and a visit to Seattle, yay!)

spasm-inducing cuteness

It's spring! So there is rhubarb, and baby bunnies. Not as many as last year, which suggests the university's trap-spay-release program may have actually accomplished something.
Alis, put on goggles and helmet for this one!
Tiny black bunnies scurry around the construction site next to the library. Here, one grooms itself. Later I may post two tiny black bunnies sharing a piece of bread.

animal planet

Theoretically we live in a city. The provincial capitol, in fact. But when I bike to work I have to swerve around the rabbits and the occasional deer, because the university forest and lawns are attractive to wildlife.
Here's a video Mark took in our backyard. Oh, yeah, we live on an island. What's the name of that rule about islands making big animals smaller?

bunnies for bogwitch and kali

DED BY TEH KEWT

It's spring, and baby bunnies are springing.



Some of them are cuter than others.


If they reproduced by fission, could you tell?


Not so small, but still cute.


Can anyone filk 'Tiny Bunnies" to the tune of "Tiny Bubbles"?

armed with a rake

that seems to strike at me.
Or, the Duchess of Malfi does yardwork, and Spring is here in all sorts of ways.

Today was the Times-Colonist 10k Run. My participation was limited to getting up at 6, with the added entertainment of watching Mark get up at 6--he is firmly in the camp of Lady Astor, reputed to have said "Do you mean to say there are two seven o'clocks in the day?"--and driving Mark, Paul, and Shona to the start. Then I found a parking spot near the finish line and went for tea.
Next year we will arrange a meeting place beforehand. The Legislature lawn has many landmarks and prominences, but with 10,000 participants and their associates wandering about, standing on a high spot only gets you so far.

It does seem somewhat unreasonable that I who did not run am having more aches & stiffness than those who did run. Arthritis--like being an athlete, in a way.

The fruit trees are blossoming and the remaining blackberry vines are leafing. I spent part of today standing on top of a stepladder waving a rake over my head to knock dead bits out of the pear tree. I spent part climbing on the rock and raking dead blackberry bits out of the St. John's wort.
Both cats came to watch: the cat that lives here (Priscilla), and the cat that doesn't live here, which proves to have a local habitation and a name (next door, Katina). The cat that doesn't live here has remarkable confidence that it does live here, and will meow at the door and walk in when the door is opened. If it weren't such a young cat, and we hadn't been living here over 20 years, I'd be persuaded it was the previous owner's cat.
The cats like to watch me work in the backyard. Priss usually stays fairly close, at ground level, and Katina perches.


At UVic the rabbits have been breeding, and there are tiny cute rabbits everywhere. A proposal to deal with them by blowing them out of their burrows with a device called a "Rodenator" (I can only assume that Verminator was taken) is doomed, doomed, doomed, because teh bunnehs r so kewwwt!!!
I have the perfect solution, though. See, the black-footed ferret is being reintroduced in Saskatchewan. And the black-footed ferret is insanely cute, with its little masky face. Bring the black-footed ferret to UVic, and let the cute predator take care of the cute pest. If rabbits run low, there's always the gray squirrels.


In other news of cute fluffy things... Priss writhes when she's petted, in a rather disturbing way. Sometimes you can pet her into such a frenzy that she rolls off the chair. We have ladderback chairs in the kitchen, and she likes to thrust her head into the gap between the seat of the chair and the ladderback slats. I worry that she'll get stuck, but so far she's always managed to pull her head back out.
You can see this coming?
Yes, I discovered that my cat could kill herself while being petted. She jammed her head under the bar, and while I skritched her back, she rolled wildly, to and fro, and ... body rolled off the seat, head remained trapped in chairback.
Fortunately I looked down as she did this, and caught her, rolled her back onto the chair, and watched her panic for a moment or two until she found the angle that would extract her head.
Has this stopped her from jamming her head through the chair? What do you think?

The ultimate spring critter, which I forgot to mention, is a lamb, and visiting Anna a couple of weeks ago I got to feed a rejected lamb. Just a little one, (though I expect bigger by now) with tightly curled white fleece, a little black crescent of a nose, and a most demanding cry. Like babies, lambs need to be fed every couple of hours, but unlike babies, lambs can follow you around and find you at need. His name is Vinnie, which should be short for vindaloo.
Anna mentioned the difficulty non-farming people have with the idea that a hand-reared animal is destined to be food, the 'how can you treat it so kindly and then kill it?' complaint. As if it would be more understandable to beat the animal every day and then kill it.
I know, I know, it's to do with the mental categories of 'companion animal' and 'food animal', but it still requires not thinking about the life of the food animal before it becomes food.

big gnashy teeth

Evidently I wasn't getting enough sleep last week, or was confused by the construction (neverending construction) at UVic which moved the entrance of the library over to what was once solid glass walls. At any rate, I forgot to lock my bike helmet up with my bike (my extremely cool matte-black bike) and left it hanging on the handlebar instead.
No, it was not stolen. It was ...(Lovecraftian ellipsis)... devoured!

You must understand, o Best Beloved, that the university, like the general hospital, is beset and beleaguered by rabbits. Spotty rabbits, white rabbits, black rabbits, lops and so on. Everything but native rabbits. This is because Bleddy Irresponsible Pet Owners who probably got Cute Bunnies for Easter, let their rabbits loose at the hospital, then at the university, when they got tired of taking care of them. And they bred, like, like, okay, you know what I mean.
It's the Victoria equivalent of alligators in the sewers.
The hospital has a more difficult time with the infestation. Bunnies get into the furnace rooms and leave little bunny pellets everywhere, they undermine foundations, and so on. The administration tried to bring in a sharpshooter to reduce the numbers, but there was a huge outcry, and volunteers rounded up hundreds of rabbits so that the people who had pleaded for the bunny-lives could adopt the cute little critters and save them from a dreadful fate.
You can guess, yes? About a dozen were actually adopted. There's a great difference between getting all sentimental about the fluffy bunnies and actually being willing to do something oneself.
A later attempt to bring in a falconer was also shouted down, even though it was the natural process and all that. It seems to me that even Disney nature films let the predator do the job once in a while.

So there are many cute bunnies on campus. And students feed them, but perhaps not enough. I returned to my bike in the dusk, to find my helmet some distance from the bicycle, with its foam pads torn from the velcro and scattered all about. Deep fang-marks were torn into the styrofoam, as of flocks of miniature vampires. I imagined them squabbling over it like seagulls, one snatching it from another, a little soccer play, the victor carrying it off (or climbing into it, which might have been easier), the others grouping and plotting their next foray.
It's Watership Down out there.

It's a bird, it's an ocelot, it's a spider

I'm not a Philip Pullman fan particularly, but this is amusing. You can go to the website for the Golden Compass film and find your own daemon, based on a rather muddled questionnaire.
Mine is presently a crow (or raven, I'm not sure) named Callum.
You can look at it here, and answer another muddled questionnaire about how you see me, to change my crow into some other beastie, though still named Callum.
The graphics are quite nice.