bunny mob

The rabbits meet with their supplier, brazenly, in broad daylight. Can nothing be done?

In other news, it's blowing up a storm here. I'm glad I'm not having to take the ferry today, and I've cancelled my earlier plan of bicycling downtown.

a brace of bunnies

MOAR BUNNEEZ!!!!
Two this time. I think there are 4 or 5 of the black litter, and they seem to be happy in amongst the rebar and planks. Hopefully they won't stick around when the concrete is poured.

I'd post something of substance and content, but I'm a bit under the weather today.

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?

bunny in motion maybe

If this works, it will be a brief video of a small bunny lolloping a short distance.
Minimalist.

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"?

photosensitive me

Back from May Crown, a terrific weekend at the Daisy May Campground near Fort Macleod. I visited with my kick-butt apprentice Alis and her lady Asha; former but still kick-butt apprentice Sina and her cute-beyond-bearing children; amazingly talented friend Nan (with detour to see her new yarn shop); about-to-be-married Meg; stunningly gorgeous Kate, and others that I'm too silly to adjectivise just now: Klaus, Nessa, Elaine and Malcolm, Freydis, ....
So yes, I was very social. And dutiful. I did about an hour of folding event handouts, two hours of gate, attended the (mercifully brief) Laurels meeting, the 'Show & Shine' (all of one person displaying work, possibly because the name is not indicative of anything specific), and the Laurel Q&A (where I ended up being Mistress Bossy-Boots because no one was in charge).

The site is a former or occasional swamp off the Oldman River. Once off the flattened campground, you can clearly see the channels and humpy islands, even without water to delineate. Doing a bit of a wander, I found two half-sunk squashed cars, with scrubby trees growing through the windows and hood in approved post-disaster movie fashion.
The full-grown trees were mostly leafless, making for a somewhat artificial, stage-setting look. Trinity thought it looked like the set for a Harry Potter film.
Where the swamp wasn't, the ground was strewn with river stones, some remarkably large. We found an impressive lump of quartz, black basalt, granite, lots of blobby sedimentary and others that Freydis identified for us (yay Freydis!). I found a little square striated stone that turned out to be petrified (?) bone - a bit of buffalo rib, maybe.
Yes, I brought back rocks. Because rocks are cool.

The first day was clear and still, the stars that night thick and swarming, the night bloody cold. I didn't properly warm up (having done the 10-midnight shift) until near light. The next two days were windy, gusting erratically and continually, and my canvas tent luffed all night. Every time I dozed off, I dreamt of sailing and woke trying to duck under the boom as we swung about to catch the breeze. Since I haven't sailed for, oh, thirty-five years, this seemed unfair.
I'm a bit wonky from lack of sleep, although I did sleep until 11 Monday morning.

After take-down, I discovered that the methotrexate warnings aren't kidding about photosensitivity. I'd managed to keep my head covered almost the whole time, but apparently not enough, and not my nose. Not only did about 15-20 minutes of sun toast the back of my neck, but my nose was blistered.
The backs of my hands burnt! The most weather-exposed, toughened parts of my body burnt, from being out in full sun for part of a day. You can see where my cuffs fell partway across the knuckles.
It makes me want to do leaf-prints on myself. If I stuck some ivy leaves on my bare pallid arms, it would probably only take about 10 minutes to establish a temporary sun-tattoo. Sure, it might hurt some, but so do tattoos.

In other health-related musings, you'd think that a test involving the words 'occult' and 'blood' would be creepy and cool, possibly admitting one to membership in an order of mystic assassins.
But this is not the case.

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.