Bunday on Tuesday

This is most irregular!  Bunday posts should be done on Bunday.  The female hoomin bean (FHB) was away for the weekend.  She was visiting her parents.  We have decided that this is an acceptable reason for not providing us the means to publish our usual Bunday post.  Naturally, we were very busy all weekend because we had to supervise the male hoomin bean (MHB), since the FHB was not here to do it.

We also have been enjoying our new expanded shared area in the home office.  The FHB found out by doing some online research that bunnies who are recently bonded can't be given too much space too soon.  Sometimes I forget who Épinette Nutkin is, and I chase her, sort of by mistake.  The FHB learned that if she expands our area gradually, this is less likely to occur.

She went and bought a dog exercise pen. I know what you're thinking....doesn't the FHB know the difference between dogs and rabbits?  Some days I wonder.  But actually, it works rather well.  It is made of multiple folding panels that can be adjusted so she set it up to go in front of our shared crate.

Most of the time, now, I remember about Épinette Nutkin and I don't chase her.

The FHB says that when the grass starts to grow properly (it's still only just starting to grow here), she will take the exercise pen outside and let us play in the grass (supervised, of course).  She says she will put some netting over the top of the pen to make sure the hawks don't decide that we are breakfast.  Imagine!

Eventually, the FHB says we won't need the dog exercise pen anymore and she can let us run around all over the place like I used to run around before Épinette Nutkin came along.

In the meantime, we continue to snuggle together and cement our bond.  And keep each other's ears clean.

Friday's Hunt, v. 3.18

It's time for Friday's Hunt, although I'm typing this on Thursday because I will have a very busy Friday on the road with work-related meetings, and I won't have time to type a blog post.  I will get it linked up after the Eden Hills post gives us the link.

The topics for this week are:  Starts with R, Week's Favourite, and Window.

Starts with R
This is a red-breasted nuthatch - a common bird in my area, and one of my favourites.  They have a funny little flute-like song when they talk to each other.  I can always tell when they're coming through the woods to the feeder - they sound like they're playing tiny party horns.

I can always tell when they're coming through the woods to the feeder - they sound like they're playing tiny party horns

Week's Favourite
I'm so thrilled that the daffodils my mother and I planted in the fall have burst into bloom this week! That makes them qualify for my favourite this week.  Here are a few shots of the mixed varieties that we planted.  Many more blooms are yet to open.

Window
One of my clients very kindly purchased me a window bird house, since she knows how much I love the birds.  So far, I don't have any residents.  I moved the bird house to a different window today in the hopes that it will be a more attractive location, since it is closer to foliage that will come out on the climbing hydrangea.  Last year the robins built a nest in the hydrangea branches.  The birdhouse is designed for chickadees or sparrows.  Soon, those leaves on the hydrangea will unfurl and the birdhouse will be more hidden.

The birdhouse attaches to the window with little suction cups.  It has a clear back, so you can see into the birdhouse from inside the people house!

There is a little mirrored surface that you attach to the window on the inside so that the birds can't see you watching them.  You can see it in the background of this picture.  It is my kitchen window, so I have some chicken-themed items on the window sill, as well as a little lavender plant that I bought a couple of weeks ago.  It is one of the fancy lavender plants that produces bracts on top of the flowers. I believe it is a Lavandula stoechas species, but the tag didn't specify anything when I bought it.  It is only good for zone 7 and up outside, which we are not, so if I decide to put it out for the summer, it will stay in a container and come back in for the winter.  Anyway, that's a bit unrelated to the window birdhouse!  If I do get any residents, you will definitely hear about it on the blog!

Bunday Blog Business

Do you know what time it is?

Of course you do.  That's why you're here.  It's time for today's Bunday blog!

Somebody asked me recently about the importance of ear cleaning.  This is a very important task for rabbits.  One reason is because we get extra vitamin D that way!  I bet you didn't know that.  Our ears have a special oil on the surface of the skin that makes vitamin D when exposed to sunlight.  Rabbits get some of this vitamin D when they clean their ears.

Lady Épinette Nutkin is especially good at ear cleaning.  You can see that in the picture below.  She is just pulling down her left ear.

She uses a paw to pull her ear down, and then she holds it in both paws as you see in this next picture. She is licking the inside of her right ear in this picture.

Hoomin beans cannot lick their own ears.  This is a very serious design flaw.  I feel sorry for you.  We also keep our ears clean to avoid having problems with mites.  I bet your hoomin ears are all full of mites because you can't lick them properly.

Sometimes we help each other with ear cleaning.  I think that's what you hoomin beans ought to do.

It wouldn't take you very long to do this, because your ears are small and insignificant compared to ours.  Sometimes, I don't even know how you manage to get along in this world, with such pitiful ears.  We can rotate our ears 270 degrees to listen to things.  Your ears are stationary.  What were you thinking when you had those ears ordered?  I suppose opposable thumbs might make up for the defect of your ears, just a bit.

So do clean your ears, or have a friend do it, on a regular basis.  Take it from me...I'm an ear expert!

Friday's Hunt v 3.17

Here we are....I have no idea where the week went, but it's Friday again!  This has certainly been a busy one.  I hadn't thought about the blog all week so I had to do a bit of quick thinking this evening to get my ducks in a row.  Our prompts from Eden Hills are:  Starts with Q, Week's Favourite, and Evening.

Starts with Q:
Q is a tricky letter, but I decided to talk about quilts.  I have made a few quilts over time, although I haven't made any lately.  I made a quilted wall hanging many years ago that I recently found when I was unpacking some boxes of things that had remained packed for many years of moves.  I'd like to put it up on the wall again somewhere.  It needs to be washed and ironed since it is all wrinkled from its storage time.  I like the colours in it and the shapes.  It was a sort of random quilt hanging that I put together in a short time frame, just for fun, so it isn't perfect.

Last year (2016) I decided to do a block-of-the-month quilt project.  I decided it would be good to make a quilt block each month and give myself a craft project to look forward to each month.  I bought all my fabrics and I was really excited about proceeding.  In January of 2016, I made the first two of 6 pieced triangles required for the January block.  I realized that I made a mistake and that the two orange small triangles in the left triangle panel should have been overlapping, like they are in the triangle on the right.  I decided I needed to fix that before continuing.  That's as far as I got on my project.  The rest of the year, I was unable to continue due to us trying to sell Marc's house, having things in storage, and then not having the space yet set up in the new house.  I thought I'd start again this January.  It's April.  I haven't gotten to it yet.  Someday...

Week's Favourite:
I managed to get some really cute shots of the red squirrel last weekend.  I think that it might be a nursing or pregnant female.  In this shot, you can really see her teats, which I don't think I've really noticed on a squirrel before.

I also noticed something else that I hadn't noticed before - she appears to be shedding a winter coat.  I didn't know squirrels did that, or at least not as noticeably as this.  You can really see the line where the winter "fluffy" coat is shedding, just behind the foreleg.

Here are a couple more of my favourite shots from my squirrel photography session!

Evening:
I had to think quickly for this one.  I don't often take evening pictures.  But let me tell you a little story about a few evenings ago.  I heard a fearsome growly-squealy noise outside, and I went to peer out the window with the aid of the standing lamp in the home office.  A raccoon was hanging off the bottom of my bird feeder and swinging on it.  This was the culprit who has been bending my feeder pole over time.

A couple of mornings later, I came downstairs to the home office to enjoy my morning coffee.  I looked out the window.  "Hmmm," I said to myself, "that's interesting.  I'm quite sure there used to be a bird feeder there."  That was when I realized that raccoons not only have an interest in the contents of bird feeders, but apparently they have a desire to take them to their little raccoon homes and possibly use them as decor items, because clearly, my raccoon had carried it off somewhere.  I have wandered through the woods looking for it, but to no avail.  He left the lid, which we had replaced after he chewed through the plastic one.  The tube that held the seeds has entirely disappeared.

He has also displaced the screening from the tray feeder, which you can see hanging down in this picture that I took this evening.

I need a taller pole, not to mention adding a raccoon baffle to it.  In other news this evening, the bunnies are resting comfortably.

Bunday Blog Business

Hello everybody, it's Pippin here!  The female hoomin bean (FHB) finally let me use the computer. She has been really busy, or so she says.  Today she and the male hoomin bean (MHB) went out for a long time and came back complaining about hard work.  Something about scraping wallpaper off walls in another house.  I think it is a house the FHB used to live in.  They are "fixing it up" I think. I don't know why they are so slow.  I fix my house up all the time just by chewing on a cardboard box and leaving the pieces in an artful display.

Anyway, I'm sure you are wondering about my new companion, the Lady Épinette Nutkin of Dazzlewood Hill.  The FHB and MHB certainly made some very significant efforts to ensure we would be friends.

First, we began with the bathtub sessions.

No, we didn't get washed.  It was just a "confined area" for us to get to know each other.  The thing is, we rabbits are a bit fussy about our companions, and we tend to either ignore potential companions, or attack them.  The hoomin beans have determined that by putting us in the bathtub (not with water or rubber ducks), they can monitor us closely and separate us if necessary, but it also sort of forces us to pay attention to one another.  I admit, they might be right about this.

Then, we graduated to the "small bathroom" sessions, when we went from the bathtub time to the small confined room time.  During this time, we were still monitored, but not as constantly as we were while we were in the tub.  It turns out that the Lady Épinette Nutkin is rather nice, and most of the time, I'm quite happy to have her around.

The hoomin beans made a lot of cooing noises when they caught us grooming each other.  Honestly, you'd think they had never seen how to properly lick your partner's ears before.

Finally, the hoomin beans put us into a shared cage, once we were regularly grooming each other and not chasing or biting (which I may have done a few times in the first few sessions, because I was agitated, you know, at the disturbance to my routine!)  We now share one crate and the litter box in the crate and most of the time, everything is just lovely.  The hoomin beans haven't had time to put the other crate away yet, but we just stay in one of them.

They did try allowing us to have shared time in the home office, but that space is too large for us at this point, and I totally forget what she is doing there and sometimes I chase her and try to bite her because I forget that I'm supposed to be nice.  When they put us back into the confined space, I remember, and I calm down again.  It is still going to take a little time and getting used to this whole "being a couple" thing, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

The FHB says we are "successfully bonded" whatever that means.  I don't see any glue.  Anyway, until next time, keep your ears clean.  Or have your partner help you with it.

Friday's Hunt v 3.16

Another busy week for me, but I managed to get myself organized for Friday's Hunt with Eden Hills. This week the prompts are:  Starts with P, Week's Favourite, and Feet (or foot).  

Starts with P
P is for pink!  This is the first non-crocus flower that has begun to appear in my garden.  It is the flower of Daphne mezereum, which has a common name in some places of February Daphne.  It would be really nice if we had flowers in February here, but we don't.  So it's April Daphne to me!  Also, the flowers are in a format that is called a panicle.  A panicle is a group or cluster of flowers, rather than a single flower form. You often see panicles on grass crops like oats.

Daphne mezereum is native to all of Europe, as well as the Caucasus, Turkey, northern Iran, and parts of Siberia.  It is very hardy, which is why it does well here. The flowers come out first and the leaves will follow later in the spring. Unfortunately, all parts of this plant are very toxic, so I need to be sure the goats and sheep never get to it!

P is also for purple.  The purple crocuses are really spectacular now - in large groups and sporting their lovely orange stigma - the bees love them at this time of year.

Week's Favourite
So, I was very excited today because I finally (FINALLY!) got a picture of an owl.  I had it in my head that today was the letter O, and I thought it was just perfect.  Then when I went to check the prompts, I realized that today was letter P.  So, my owl picture has become my week's favourite.  I have been trying for many weeks to take a picture of an owl.  I keep hearing them in my woods and even wrote a separate blog post about the owls thwarting my efforts.  Today, my effort finally paid off.  I was actually helped by some crows who were mobbing this poor owl, so they tipped me off to its location.  I had been hearing a barred owl in the woods, but this one is actually a great horned owl. It was very high in the tree, and there were a lot of intervening branches, so it was a difficult shot, but at least it's recognizable.  I hope to get a better picture in the future.  The owl was watching me and I knew it was already upset by the crows, so I didn't want to stress it out even more.  I took my picture from a distance and thanked the universe for such a wonderful gift.

Feet
Today I took a picture of Marc's feet.  He was up on the ladder working in the garage, so his feet were at my eye level.  That made them a convenient photo subject!

He is continuing his work on the outbuilding that will become his workshop.  Today he was installing two lamps that will be over a workbench.  They are vintage lamps that he purchased at an antique shop.

Hopefully they will be just what he needs for proper illumination.  Bulbs will help, I'm sure!

Bunday Blog Business

Well, I am just flabbergasted this week.  I don't even know where to begin with telling you everything.  It is such a crazy story!  I guess I will begin at the beginning.

Last weekend, like I told you, the female hoomin bean (FHB) went on an unauthorized leave of absence to a "fibre arts retreat" which was totally not cleared by my department before she left.  I will not go into great detail but I will say that I peed on the footstool by her desk while she was gone to express my displeasure.  I do not normally do this.  I was very annoyed.

While the FHB was gone, the male hoomin bean (MHB) took me on an outing.  This outing was also unauthorized by my department, but he did not give me any say in the matter. He took me to a place that had a smell I kind of recognized, but I had forgotten exactly what it was about.  Then, all of a sudden, I was in this room, with another rabbit. Seriously.  What the heck?  I was completely out of my zone.  The other rabbit was sniffing me and following me around and I was kind of freaked out about it.  Then, just as quickly, the MHB took me back home again, after having had some discussions with somebody at a desk.  I figured maybe he was missing the FHB so he wanted to go hang out with me and another rabbit to feel better.

So then the FHB came home and it was a day called her birfday.  I don't know much about what a birfday is, but there was a bit of commotion about it.  I can tell you that a birfday doesn't happen all the time.  In fact, this was the first birfday I remember experiencing. 

On her birfday, the FHB went to be with her people who play with sticks and string and make stuff with the string.  While she was there, the MHB went out again.  And you are not going to believe this, but he came home with that very same rabbit that we hung out with on the weekend when the FHB was away.  And there I was thinking that she was only going to hang out with the string people and she would be back soon so why did we need to hang out with the other rabbit again?

And then, the FHB came home. Oh. My. Goodness.  You should have heard the squeals and squeaks that came out of the FHB when she came home to see that other rabbit.  I'm just sitting there, as usual, awaiting her complete attention, and she does not even notice me because "squeeeeeeeeeeeeee" and on and on it goes....because the MHB was hiding the other rabbit and this is what she saw when she came into the home office with her camera ready because he told her there would be something special and she thought he was making her a new bird house or something.  He turned around and there was THIS!

So now, here I am, a few days later, and this other rabbit is STILL here.  And now they have named her.  Her name is Lady Épinette Nutkin of Dazzlewood Hill, and I am now told that she is my "companion" and that we are to be friends.  Who asked ME??  I did NOT authorize this.  However, she is rather pretty, so I am considering my options.

You may know that rabbits can be a bit fussy about their companions and so the FHB and the MHB have done "research" about this and they are now subjecting me to the "introduction process" as they call it, and supposedly this is going to make me more inclined to accept this interloper rabbit who is possibly trying to usurp my position.  


And so we have side by side accommodation, to allow us time to "get to know each other" they said.  Hmpf.

Well. We shall see.  Indeed.  We shall see!  At least she cleans her ears.