The Weekend Roundup: P

The prompts for The Weekend Roundup from Tom the Backroads Traveller are: Starts with P, Purple, and Favourite.

Starts with P:

Our rabbit, Pippin, starts with P.  His full name is Sir Pippin of Dazzlewood Hill, but we just call him Pippin and he doesn't mind.  

As you can see, it is moulting time of year for Pippin.  Notice how the fur on his side, at the bottom, is puffier and longer than on his back. Rabbits all moult, but they don't moult as heavily every time.  Sometimes they just shed some of their fur, and sometimes they have a full moult when all of their fur is replaced.  That is the kind of moult that Pippin is currently having.  Here's a picture from a couple of weeks ago.  You can really see the patchy nature of his coat as the long old fur is coming out and being replaced by new fur.

When domestic rabbits moult, it is important to keep an eye on them to ensure they don't have digestive problems.  They can quite easily ingest a lot of hair due to self cleaning (licking) and end up with hairballs.  Rabbits can't throw up like cats, so the hairball has to come out the other way.  I give our rabbits some papaya, which helps prevent hairballs.  I also spend time grooming Pippin to get as much of the loose fur out as I can, preventing him from ingesting it.  Here is the result of a recent grooming session.  That's a lot of fur!

Purple:

A few months ago, well....maybe a year ago...I don't really remember....I spun this bobbin of purple and pink merino fibre.  I loved the colours, but couldn't decide whether to ply it back on itself to make a 2 or even 3 ply yarn, or to ply it with something else.  

Recently, I acquired this new-to-me fibre from another spinner's destash of items she was selling, and realized it will be the perfect match.  It is East Friesland wool, which is a breed of dairy sheep from northern Germany.  They do not have a very long fleece length but it is still very easy to spin and I think that it will be a lovely match for this merino fibre.  So, I will be taking the time to spin this new fibre, and then I will ply the two bobbins together to make a 2-ply yarn.

Favourite:

A favourite picture from the past week - this one of Pippin and Epinette.  Very comfortable rabbits who feel safe in their environment will sometimes lay on their sides like this.  It is sort of "dead rabbit pose" but don't worry, she is very much alive!  She is still battling pneumonia though, and has another vet appointment this coming Thursday.  

 A bonus favourite for this week - I now have two young hens who are laying green eggs!  This is because they have Isbar genetics.  Isbar are a Swedish breed of chicken.  I love the gentle green and blue eggs that appear in my nest boxes now, along with the lovely browns and creams.  I took this picture on a lovely wooden platter made with bird's eye maple, which my Dad polished for me on their recent visit, which really brings out the grain.

Friday's Hunt v 4.15

Time for Friday's Hunt after a busy week, but I'm managing to actually do it on a Friday.  I missed visiting the other participants last week but will try to visit everybody this week and comment on the posts I missed last week. 

The prompts for this week are:  Starts with O, Purple, and City/Town.

Starts with O
Orange starts with O.  This week, the rabbits have been eating a pumpkin that I bought.  The outside of a pumpkin is a very bright orange, and the inside is also orange, but a lighter shade.  The sheep also like pumpkin, so I really bought the pumpkins for them, but the rabbits ate almost an entire pumpkin before I managed to find the time to chop up the second one for the sheep.

Here's how it started - some innocent nibbles on the outer orange pumpkin skin.  No, the decorative mouse wasn't responsible!

Pretty soon, we had this situation...

...after which there were just a few seeds left.  No more pumpkin needed for those bunnies!

A bonus orange item - here's a jar of the 3-citrus ginger zucchini marmalade I made for my Dad for his birthday.  It came out very well and he gave it the thumbs up on a taste test!

Purple
This one was a bit tricky for me - I don't have a lot of purple things to photograph.  I noticed that I do not have many spools of purple thread on my thread rack (at least not compared to other colours).

I have some fabric in my stash that includes purple tones - I haven't decided what this fabric will be yet, but I love the colours and patterns in it.

Here's a crochet project that is currently on hiatus while I work on some other items, but it has some touches of purple in it.

City/Town
I was born in a large city - Montreal, in the province of Quebec, Canada.  The population of Montreal is almost 1.75 million.  At about age 5, I moved to Scarborough, which used to be its own city, but now it is an administrative district of the city of Toronto, Ontario.  Toronto has about 2.8 million residents.  When I was about 10, we moved to Halifax, in the province of Nova Scotia.  It's a smaller city, at about 415,000 residents in the greater metropolitan area. 

It wasn't until my mid 20's that I moved to a smaller town - Truro, Nova Scotia, in order to attend the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.  Truro is a town of about 12,300 residents.  That was the smallest place I'd ever lived to that point in my life, which I thought I would really dislike, but I found something charming about being able to drive around and see fields full of cows and sheep.  As I've grown older, I have come to truly appreciate living in a more rural setting. 

I now live on the outskirts of a town of about 5,500 residents.  I love visiting a large city to take in the sights, enjoy the cuisine options and partake of the cultural life, but I am very content to live in a rural setting.  I listen to birds, not traffic and sirens.  I breathe clean air, not smog and exhaust from traffic jams.  I can enjoy the freedom to have sheep, goats, and chickens on my property.  I can see more stars on a clear night than most city dwellers ever see.  I hear the unmistakable haunting cry of the loon on the nearby lake, and the hoots of owls as the sun goes down.  I smell the tang of freshly cut hay on the air, or the fragrance of the pine and spruce trees surrounding my home.  I belong in this setting - going back to live in a city would make me feel cramped and stressed.  Here's a view from one of my recent walks around the streets where I live.  I think you can see it's not city life, but it's a great life for me.

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!