magic bunny

Hello everyone... To the few of you who read this, sorry I've been MIA for so long! :-( No dramatic, tragic things have occurred, I just have not blogged. Sure, life has been "busy," but it always is. It's more a matter of what I decide to prioritize. Lately, work has been the major priority, and it's amazing how much time one can spend working!

One of the things I've been learning (relearning?) in this season of extreme work is that some of the smallest things have the biggest importance. I've spoken before about cleaning. That's one of them. Still haven't gotten that entirely rooted in my brain yet. Another one is taking care of what one's been given -- and for me right now that includes a) my body (giving it enough rest, quality food, showers, visits to the doctor, etc.) and b) my rabbit, Joelle.

The other night I had some gal friends over for a "tea party" (we...sat around the table and drank tea. Not exactly a party, but it was good) and towards the end we somehow got to talking about Joelle and grooming her. I mentioned that it's possible to put rabbits in a "trance" to work on their bellies when grooming them, and then of course they wanted to see this amazing phenomenon. So I scooped up Joelle and laid her on her back and rubbed her nose, and sure enough her head lolled to the side and she was passed out.

In the midst of this all I realized that she's a big, huge mess. I know she's been matted for a while, but she hates being groomed and I don't like doing it, so we agree to just not do the grooming thing most of the time. But at this point...it was really bad. So after the tea party I spent a good couple hours working away at her major problem areas.

Angora rabbits typically shed their coats several times a year. If one doesn't brush them regularly - especially during the shedding period - the shed hair just gets incorporated into mats. It makes it sort of fun to brush out mats, because if you put a mat rake to a mat made out of hair that's already been shed, huge chunks of hair start just falling out as the mat is destroyed. I find it rather satisfying.

Another aspect of this shed is that if one were to actually groom the rabbit at the appropriate times, they could easily harvest all of that hair that's being shed because it just pulls out. I have never really done this with Joelle for various reasons -- usually I just cut her hair short every now and then. I actually didn't realize quite what this "harvest" meant until lately when I visited this website.

But, on this fateful night, it just so happened that Joelle was shedding, and as I brushed out the tangles behind her ears, her hair just kept falling out and falling out. It was like magic! So, I thought...this would be a prime time to see just what happens when I harvest in the "right" way.

Joelle wasn't a huge fan of this, and we'd already been in grooming mode for at least 1.5 hours -- producing this fine mess...
...so I didn't get far. But...you can see the results:

alterations and another mystery

For Labor Day weekend I set out to finish revisions for a paper I submitted months ago, cut Joelle's hair all off, do all of the dishes, and unpack boxes that have been sitting in my bedroom since I got here in April. I also intended to get a fairly good chunk of work done in the lab.

At the end of the weekend, what I had in fact done was...play the Sims 2 for a good 12 hours, chill with friends on Saturday and Sunday nights and all afternoon Monday, have ice cream and coffee with coworkers, wash half of the dishes, cut about a quarter of Joelle's hair so that she looks rather insane, write about one sentence for the paper and take out about ten sentences, and rearrange all of the furniture in my apartment.

Hm.

The good news is that somewhere in the midst of the half-hearted haircut and the major change in layout, Joelle seems to be making it into her litter box much better. It is also possible that my presence in the apartment (as opposed to the lab) for much of the weekend contributed to her success. I have also been slipping in some raisins and outstanding grapes when she gets treats for good behavior. In any case, something seems to be working.

Back at work, another mystery exists. In the history of my lab's working with my bacterium, there has only been one or two instances where there has been successful growing of the bacteria on what we call agar plates. They're sort of like Jell-o in a Petri dish. My bacteria only grow when there is no oxygen, and they like very specific growth conditions (a.k.a. what's in the Jell-o). Apparently I am not providing them with what they want, because they are not growing. And that is not good.

The question is WHY. There are several possibilities. One is that there is oxygen in the place where I'm trying to grow the bacteria, and that would make the bacteria die. Another is that the agar plates have not been prepared correctly, which could mean that the ingredients are slightly wrong, they got burned in the process of being made, THEY have oxygen in them, or something else. And it is also possible that there is both a problem with oxygen in the growth chamber and issues with the agar plates.

Slowly but surely clues are coming in. First, the chamber that I thought had no oxygen in it seems to in fact have oxygen. It depends on whether I look at the electronic oxygen sensor (which says there isn't any) or at the low-tech oxygen sensing paper strip (which says there IS). I tend to believe the paper strip since when I put excess non-oxygen gas into the growth chamber and overpressure it so that the rubber gloves that are part of the contraption blow up like balloons and stick out, the gloves deflate back to normal pressure within a few hours. This indicates a leak. Not Joe, being a mechanical engineer and rather handy, stopped by the lab and helped me in this investigation and agrees with me that there's a leak. He's funny: he wanted to figure out in which part of the multi-part chamber the leak existed, and he asked if I had a stethoscope so he could listen for leaks. Why in the world would I just randomly have a stethoscope!? Apparently a screwdriver works just as well, because he used that instead and achieved his diagnosis.

Another clue is that agar plates stored in a separate non-oxygen chamber have a high pH. This is bad since the bacteria don't like high pH and will die if exposed to it. What is kind of annoying is that the chamber in which the pH is wrong actually has no oxygen, which is what I want. But since it has nitrogen gas and not the carbon dioxide that would make the agar plates be at a normal pH, it's useless.

I also realized that the previous work done with the bacteria in our lab was performed in a chamber that detected oxygen using the same oxygen detector that seems to be giving erroneous readings in the leaky chamber. That old chamber also had some odd glove pressurization issues, so it's quite possible that it, too, was leaking and had oxygen inside and was killing the bacteria.

So, at least things are starting to make some sense. The long and short of it all is that there are probably multiple issues going on. Now all I need is one simple way to fix all of those issues. ...Getting that simple way is probably not going to be very easy, though!

Thank goodness I took a class in forensic science in college, eh? I'll get to the bottom of this, and hopefully within a couple weeks I'll have bacteria growing AND all of Joelle's bathroom habits contained in one location. Hopefully I will not need to rearrange all of the furniture in the lab in order to do so...!

behavior problems

My poor Joelle... I think that something is wrong with her, but since she is a rabbit she cannot tell me what the issue is. Thus I must conduct some detective work and attempt to interpret her clues.

me? have behavior problems?

Her behavior has changed since we moved to State College, and that is what has me concerned. The major concern is her use (or lack thereof) of the litter box. In my place in Pittsburgh Joelle had a box in her "house" and another one in the bathroom. She preferred the one in the bathroom, and often when I would come home and let her out of the house she would dash straight away into the bathroom. When I moved to State College I set up a box in the bathroom and showed it to her and even laid out carpet leading up to the box so she would not have to put her furry paws on the slippery tile. However, she has yet to use that box. In addition, not too long after I moved (within a month) she started using other parts of her house instead of her box as the place to pee. This is the most troubling part - and the most annoying. After a couple incidents that first month she's been pretty good, but in the past month she's been pretty consistently leaving spots in the corners that are not where her litter box is. I don't quite know what to do. One day this week I got exasperated and shoved the bathroom box into the house, also...leaving pretty much no room to do much of anything except sit in a litter box. That stopped the peeing-not-in-the-box thing. For about two days. Now it's back and apparently is spreading to any corner she wants.

The peeing is concerning enough, but also in the past week I have caught her chewing up the fabric on my footstool (Curses!!! That's a discontinued slipcover color, naughty rabbit!!) and digging at the carpet near the glass slider (trying to get outside???). She's just been acting WEIRD!

Several possibilities come to my mind:

• The apartment is smaller than the one in Pittsburgh, so maybe she feels cramped
• I am not home as much as I was in Pittsburgh, so maybe she is lonely and bored
• Her hair is a big huge matted mess, so maybe she is feeling miserable about being unkempt
• Moving probably stressed her out a lot, and maybe that and all the other things have just put her over the edge

Now...what do to about any of those things?

• I could add on to her house and/or rearrange the furniture to make it seem more roomy (or move to a bigger place...haha, not really)
• I could get another rabbit, although that would make it even MORE cramped!
• I could terrorize her by cutting off all of her hair so she's clean again, or I could even pay a lot to have the vet do it while Jo is sedated (this seems like a very tempting option...although the since rabbits are tricky the anesthesia scares me and I feel kind of like it's a cop-out and that I'm a bad mom who can't brush her own kid's hair and that it costs a lot)
• I could do yoga with her...? Or see if there's bunny Prozac. Or maybe at least do some cuddle sessions, although she doesn't really like cuddling

I suppose I'll try the easier ones first and see what happens. Any thoughts?

hot...but not stupid!

It's REALLY hot.

It's 7:50p.m., and it's 86 degrees F outside. The high today was 90.

Technically, this is cooler than it was in Honduras. However, it certainly feels hotter. Partly because of the humidity - Honduras was much more dry heat and sometimes reminded me of a sauna; here it feels like any moment it could downpour, and I really wish it would. I think it also feels hotter than Honduras because this is PENNSYLVANIA and not Honduras and what is the weather doing being so incredibly hot in Pennsylvania?

The shops downtown (downtown being the two streets directly across from the University) are having lots of fun sales. The optical store is having two sales: the "It's so freaking HOT" sunglasses sale and "I'm squinting at the optical store sign" sunglasses sale. I don't quite get it either, that's just what the signs said. I also walked by the Corner Room restaurant which had a large sign telling passers-by that it's too hot to cook at home, come in and eat in their air conditioning.

And speaking of air conditioning...

That is what is lacking in my apartment at the moment. I'm thinking that it hasn't worked at all since I moved in, but I tend to not run the A/C unless I have to, so I hadn't really used it until it got unbearable with the 90+ days this past weekend. The beauty of living in an apartment is that when something doesn't work, you just call and tell someone and they fix it. So I called about the A/C problem today.

In the lab where I did my graduate work, there was a saying amongst my coworkers that once one gets his or her PhD, he or she tends to lose all common sense and can't think intelligently like most people. I promised them that I would try my darndest to not do that. I don't claim to always know everything, but I try to at least not disregard lab safety, University rules, and federal laws as some people I know seem to think they can do just because they have a PhD. I think that my coworkers' insights are an exception to the more commonly held view that PhD's are exceptionally bright. I'm not saying that either of those opinions are entirely accurate. However, sometimes I wonder if the random people who communicate with me would treat me differently if they knew I had a PhD. They might think that I know kind of what I'm talking about, give me a little credit. Maybe they wouldn't tell me ridiculous things like the person who came to check on my air conditioner today.

I got home from work after my stroll through HOT downtown and HOT residential neighborhood and HOT shopping area and was happy to find that there was a note under my door indicating that someone had indeed responded to my service request. That was quick! Good! The poor Angora rabbit with way more hair than any innocent animal should be expected to have when it's 90 degrees outside (Joelle) really deserves the decency of a semi-controlled climate even if her owner can get by in the heat by just closing the shades and taking off her clothes. But as I read through the note on the service report, I realized that it was going to be yet another long, sweltering night for both of us.

poor, hot jo

"I checked AC. It was off at the thermostat. I turned it on and AC was working OK. I left it set to 75 degrees."

Said individual was even so kind as to write on my wall above the thermostat in red pencil where the different settings for my heating and cooling controls are. In case you need more than a PhD to figure that out.
There was, indeed, a fan thing making noise throughout my apartment, which might in fact indicate that the central air was working.

However, if you look at the picture above, you will notice that it was STILL 80 DEGREES. After the thermostat had been set to 75. And the "air conditioning" had been running all afternoon.

Maybe I am at fault for not going into detail with my complaint to the apartment folks. I had just told them that the AC wasn't working. I didn't tell them that what wasn't working was that it wouldn't go below 80, and that this indicated to me that the cooling part of the AC coolant system was not working although the fan obviously was. I also did not explain that the fan mysteriously turns on every now and then even when the AC is set to off. I also did not say that since it was probably just running up my electric bill to keep the fan part running and wasn't even doing anything useful, I had turned the thermostat to OFF and realized that this would certainly mean that no cold air would come out of the vents. I guess I had figured that someone who knows about fixing air conditioners would be as capable as I, who knows next to nothing about air conditioners, to notice that when the AC was on and the fans were going, the air that was coming out of the vents wasn't cold.

But apparently the obvious problem was that the resident was far too much of a nincompoop to realize that the air conditioning in fact needed to be turned on.

Blah!

I don't know; it's probably just me, but if I were the one checking into the complaint, I would assume that they person had already tried to turn the thermostat to COOL. Since it had been a bazillion thousand degrees all weekend. And that's how you get the air conditioner to work. It would seem like most people would know that the air conditioning does not magically turn on all by itself and that you need to actually turn it on.

I assume too much, I guess.

So...we'll see what happens tomorrow. I left a message in the office again - they are of course closed by the time I return home from work - with a bit more detail about what is going on. I really, really, really, really hope that 80 degrees is not the absolute limit of the central air conditioning system.

everybody needs sleep

I recall quite distinctly the Sesame Street montage of "Everybody Sleeps." I thought the most wonderful way to sleep would be the little girl in the car seat (can you believe those were considered safe!?!?!) with the wind blowing through her hair. The second best way would be floating on an air mattress in a pool.

I've been reminded of the importance of sleep over the past couple days. I skimped on the sleep last Thursday, and I think that set me up for getting a coworker's cold/flu thing, because I'm feeling rather under the weather now. Bad time to get sick -- I have less than two weeks to get my PhD dissertation handed in to my thesis committee. AAAK! I have thus been working day and night at writing, rewriting, researching, making figures, etc. And sometimes that's meant I've forgotten I need to sleep.

But...thanks to my rabbit Joelle, I've remembered.
I have not often observed Joelle sleeping. In retrospect, this is probably due to the fact that rabbits are crepuscular and thus are most active in the mornings and evenings, which happen to be the times that I am at home and in the presence of Joelle. Over the past several weeks, however, I've been doing more work from home. When she's not chewing up my computer cords, Joelle usually rests in one of her favorite places. But even then, I had not really seen her sleeping in those places, although it's kind of hard to tell with all that hair. Either she's getting TIRED of me being home all the time or she's getting sick (let's hope not!) or she's exhausted because it's shedding season or maybe I've just been paying more attention -- but as the weeks have worn on, I've caught her sleeping more and more often!
Her favorite place these days is under the pink chair.
No, no - not on it -- UNDER it!
More rarely I've found her asleep in her "house" (cage).
Yesterday I thought I saw her sleeping but wasn't sure: she was twitching her ears and chewing now and then. It reminded me of the puppies I've had who would all but run while having a dream. She was indeed asleep, and Joelle was having a pretty intense dream!! I wonder, what do rabbits dream of...?

I'm thinking I'd better take a lesson from the wise bun and get some more rest myself. Sleeping is, after all, very necessary for keeping people and rabbits alike in healthy, cheerful, good working order. And I think it also contributes to cuteness, too.

happy home

I love stepping into my apartment these days. For one thing, it's warm. It doesn't even need to actually be very warm in the apartment for it to feel warm coming from outside -- it's been FrEeZiNg recently, so as long as the temp in the apartment is over 20F, it's warm!

For another thing, it now smells like lilies. I don't often remember that a scent can really make or break a place. The gentle aroma of lilies is a truly wonderful experience. Why does my place smell like lilies? My new pal Trader Joe gave me some flowers. Literally - I did not buy them. I went there for the first time last Thursday, and after kind of bumbling around near what seemed to be the checkout mob, a kind cashier said he could ring up my (organic -- one was even mostly local!) items if I'd step over away from the wad of people. I said thanks and admitted that I was a bit disoriented since this was my first time there. He expediently bounded over to the floral section and came back with a huge bouquet of roses, Gerbera daisies, carnations, and...lilies! "Since it's your first time here, here's a gift - I hope it brings you back." ...I'll take it!(Yes, I am that person who still has not put away the Christmas decorations so I still have a Christmasy table runner...)

And, of course, there's my Joelle always waiting to greet me. The poor dear has been very patiently dealing with my harassment of late - she's developed some major mats, and that requires a lot of yucky maintenance work like the evil Combing and Brushing and Mat-Raking and, of course, Trimming. She mostly hates it because it requires the two things she despises the most: being held and being put belly-up.

We've also been facing a sort of hay crisis. I like to buy my hay from one place, and every time I've gone there for the past month or two, they haven't had any hay! That was okay the first couple times, but then...the stock at home kept getting lower and lower and lower, and pretty soon I was quite truly "scraping the bottom of the barrel" (er...box, it's not really a barrel) to get out the last bits of hay. The fact that by now the hay was indeed in BITS was also bad, because it meant that the small hay pieces fell to the bottom of the hay-holder in Joelle's house. So maybe I'm just babying her, but when I saw Joelle putting both paws up on the rim of the holder and sticking her head in as far as she could reach to get at the hay, I declared, "That's it! I'm buying you a new thing for the hay!"

That meant a bowl. But it couldn't be just any bowl, because Joelle does not like to eat out of bowls; she likes to dump out the contents of bowls and then eat. That's okay now and then, but when it's the daily hay that means it gets REALLY hay-y all over the floor, and I am not too into that...and it just contributes to MORE matting and then the resultant Combing, Brushing, Raking, Trimming, and being held belly-up! That is why her food pellet bowl is bolted to the side of her kennel and is therefore un-dumpable. I wasn't too keen on another bolted bowl. So, the new hay-bowl had to be a heavy bowl, one that could not be flipped over with normal bunny strength.

Luckily, I found the perfect dish.I think she likes it as much as I do.

she's five!

Fish may have brief lives, but the good news is that rabbits don't. Joelle and I celebrated her fifth birthday on Wednesday. She chewed some holes in one of my throw pillows......and I cut off the hair on the top of her head so she could see better and then served her a magic birthday basket salad with kale, parsley, and hidden apples and carrots.

confirmation that i am in fact a woman

...Hm, on second thought, perhaps that isn't the best of titles for a blog post. But I'm keeping it.

Hello, everyone! Yes, I exist still. It's amazing - I thought for sure that when I went to sleep at 6a.m. on Saturday morning after being in and out of the lab since 8a.m. on Friday that I would never wake up. But I did, in fact, wake up...at 2:30p.m. It was quite a surprise to look at the clock and see that the day was mostly over. I had just enough time to cram in a "breakfast" of coffee and a banana and "lunch" of chocolate chip cookie dough before it was time to meet a friend for dinner at 5! The moral of the story is that I have been crazy busy with work.

It's good - I have proven to myself that I can in fact singlehandedly take care of an experiment that normally I would be required to employ the assistance of at least 3 other people. This is very difficult to schedule, in case you couldn't figure that out for yourself. It is much easier to schedule an experiment into my life when it is just ME who needs to be involved with it. And truthfully it doesn't take that much longer to do with just me than it does with everyone else, although I have to sacrifice a couple replicates of tissue samples, which means less statistical power. But oh well. It's much less of a headache.

Now, that has nothing to do with my post's title! Let me get to the point here...

I got my hair trimmed last Saturday, and the stylist thought it would be great to straighten it. She tried to convince me that despite what everyone seems to think, it doesn't really take that much time to style one's own hair from naturally curly to unnaturally straight using a brush and a hair dryer. She did it in about 12 minutes. And, as she said, everyone should have 12 minutes to give up in a day - it would be rather a bad thing if one didn't. What she doesn't realize, though, is that even if I had all the time in the world to straighten my hair, I do not a) want to and b) own a hair dryer. At any rate, here is a picture of me with the straight and trimmed hair.Ah - and speaking of haircuts, someone else recently got one because she looked a bit crazified herself.It was indeed driving her to eat phone books, it appears. However, cutting Joelle's hair isn't a one-time event. It's a multi-day process because she dislikes it so distinctly and because there is so much hair. So I thought I might terrorize her by making a sort of mohawk and taking pictures to then display on the world wide web.Finally we got it all off. Isn't she a looooong bunny??I love it when she lays all stretched out like that.

Okay, so I got my hair cut. And then I threw on jeans and a fleece and old tennis shoes and ran some errands and went to an intense counseling session and then went to the vicinity of my church. I wanted to attend the Saturday night service because I was slated to meet a friend on Sunday and wanted to keep that open in case I had to hit the road before church time to reach the 3-hour-away destination. I didn't realize that there are extra funky people hanging around the church area on Saturday evenings.

I should note that my church is located in what many would call a "bad" part of town. It's really not, but it is on the cusp and is often populated with people who would most likely fall into the poverty category. Not that this really bothers me, but I am aware that there are certainly some shady dealings going on at some times, and it's good to keep aware of one's surroundings.

I had reached the church area early and decided to walk a block to the gas station to get some food since I was absolutely starving. As I walked along this fine gentleman (I say sarcastically) called out, "Where you going with that fine self?" (And, I should note - this was the best - this other dude leaning against the wall of the building I was passing muttered, "None of your business!" Thanks, man!) I totally ignored him and kept walking. But then I thought...wait a second...I'm wearing JEANS a FLEECE and GRUBBY TENNIS SHOES. Hello??! I do NOT look fine! But, apparently I did, because when I (regrettably) walked back the same way, he reminded me several more times that I looked good. Maybe it was the haircut?

Okay, so that was last week. And it didn't irk me too much other than the fact that even if I try really hard to be modest and don't try at all to even look nice, men can still take a totally innocent woman and situation and make it be inappropriate. (I should note that women can also do this; the point isn't that men are evil, because they're not. They're just men.)

This week walking to church, however, was when I really realized that I'm a woman.

I like to think that I don't come off as being very vulnerable. I'm tall and I usually try to walk like I know where I'm going. And I am pretty sure it looks like I could run really fast if I had to (and I am pretty sure I actually could, too). I try to convince myself that I am, in fact, quite confident and capable and safe and able to defend myself or deal with bad people that might happen upon my path. And then something like today happens.

I'm on my way to church, going across the street, and this guy is jaywalking across the other street perpendicular to me. Our paths intersect and he says something semi-normal-to-this-area like, "Hi, Miss Lady," which usually means absolutely nothing. I replied with a friendly and courteous, "Hi!" To which he then went on, reaching into his pocket, "I've got something I know you'll love."

Er. I doubted that. I don't know what that something was, but I said, "I'm fine, I don't need anything, thanks," and kept walking.

Right, so that wasn't so bad. But...

But why in the world did I suddenly feel like I wanted to go hide somewhere and cry? Why did I feel so flustered? This person did not attack me or in any way threaten to injure me. We were in broad daylight and there's always about 5 cops doing traffic and stuff around the church, which was about 100 yards away. Why did I feel so...scared?

I'm a woman. Underneath this whole, "I've got it all together, don't mess with me, I can take care of myself, I'm very brave" facade, I know I'm this close to getting plucked from the sidewalk by some strong male and assaulted. I know I'm the target for lewd and inappropriate comments and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I know that I want someone to protect me and I hate having to walk through dark or scary places by myself.

So, in a sense, it's good for things like this to happen to me. They remind me of how I really feel deep down, how I try to cover it up and pretend I'm someone I'm not. It's unfortunate that this pretending is what is both celebrated and accepted in the world today. It's unfortunate that there is such a women-centered battle going on without very many people being acutely aware of it. And it's unfortunate that more men don't realize that women (at least this one!) want to be fought for, defended, and in the end treated with the utter dignity and sheer love for which they were created.

da po' bun

My poor rabbit, Joelle...

I neglect her beautiful coat. She does a very good job of keeping it clean - I see her licking it all the time and chewing out all the hay that sticks to her. However, she can't keep the hair on her underside free of debris and mats. That's my job, which I've been ignoring for a long time. :-(

It's led to a few rather funny incidents. Pictures of the one recently were taken the night before I left on a trip I have to tell you all about, and all of my clothes were in the washing machine, so that explains why I am wearing such a freaky outfit.What's that on her butt, you ask? Well...Yeah, she's made in China...

Well, on Tuesday my wonderful friend and coworker came over to help me chop out some of the mess that is Joelle's undercoat. Wonderful friend and coworker has experience cutting her dogs' hair, and she did a great job with her lagomorph subject. Joelle, of course, didn't enjoy any moment of the experience of being HELD and RESTRAINED and TURNED ON HER BACK! By the end of the hair-cutting session, Joelle was pretty much submitted by default because she was exhausted. When we let her free, she rested under her favorite chair for two hours before she found the strength to eat her favorite greens that were sitting right in front of her. Before she slinked to the chair, she showed us exactly how embarrassed and upset she felt...

making money from home

Joelle gets bored sitting at home all the time. As much as I let her run around the apartment when I'm home, there are still many days when she has to spend at least 9 hours in her kennel. (I might note, however, that she quite enjoys her kennel and chooses to sit in it even when she has the option to be elsewhere.) At some point in these long hours she has taken to picking up new skills. I'm not sure where she thought of this because we don't have a television at home, so it certainly wasn't from a commercial! Maybe the nameless bunny who came to visit clued her in. Regardless, I caught Joelle practicing to be none other than the Cadbury bunny in the week leading up to Easter! Behold:(Quality isn't so hot...but it's short!)

Seems that Joelle wants to break into show-business and add to the household income after seeing me toil over tax forms.

funny bunnies

Having the Boy Bunny at the apartment has convinced me that I will not get a second rabbit unless he/she can live with Joelle in the same cage and they are best buddies. Double the work is just not working for me! But, it's been a real treat to have Boy Bunny be around and get some not-in-the-shelter time. He's going back to the shelter tomorrow.

Both Boy Bunny and Joelle were very effective at amusing me over the weekend. I admit that I tricked him into this the first time by putting a treat inside the empty tissue box, but Boy Bunny kept going back for more, even when there wasn't a treat awaiting him.

note the despair.com box in the background, indicating how boy bunny must have felt.

Joelle has certainly been known to get her head stuck in a box or two, also, but this weekend she mastered another type of packaging. I was putting some things away in the kitchen and listening to what she was up to in the living room, and all sounded fine. But as I continued to listen and thought about what I was hearing, the sound of plastic being nudged was going on for far too long for Joelle to really be just pushing around a plastic bag as I had assumed. Thus I investigated and found...Joelle has this thing for apples. (Don't ask why there was a bag of apples sitting in the middle of the living room... The bag of oranges sat there for a week and were fine!) Having eaten through the plastic bag and chewed up at least 1/8 of the apple, Joelle certain staked a claim to that particular apple...

What funny bunnies!

blame the guinea pigs

Did you know that it's Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month? It is.

I am part of a rabbit food buying program with the Pittsburgh House Rabbit Club, and I get periodic emails from the Club. Late last week I received an email asking people to consider fostering a rabbit for a bit because of overcrowding at the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society. They have lots of rabbits, and that's somewhat okay, but they had suddenly had an influx of guinea pigs, which compete for space in their cages.

Being that I did not want any rabbits to be euthanized and that I have thought about fostering a few times before, I went ahead and made another cage from extra parts from Joelle's abode, and on Tuesday I picked up this thing:

a little camera shy

This rabbit is about half the size of Joelle (Jo is 8 pounds, this one is 4) and has way, way, way less hair. It's name is (or, perhaps, was - see below) Bella Beatrice, I picked this bunny to come home with me for a few weeks because she was reported to bite and be very territorial in the cage. Well, not like I've never been snorted and charged at by Joelle... Joelle is not a big fan of people messing with her while she's in her house. She does have a bit of an attitude problem. So, I figured I could deal with Bella B just fine.

As I was filling out the paperwork to take Bella back home, it became apparent that this rabbit was in fact not a female but a male and that he had been living in a home with a dog. Not that dogs and rabbits can't get along, but it certainly takes some work, particularly if the dog was bred for hunting, as this dog had been. I figured I could understand why "Bella" was so upset with people coming into his place when they all called him a cute girl and all he wanted to do was prove his manliness and get even with the blood-thirsty dog! Poor boy.

So, now there's a male sleeping in my bedroom...

so calm, so cool. perhaps "iceman" would be a good name...?

So far he has been pretty good - much more friendly than Joelle (it took her a few months before she would willingly approach me -- this guy jumps right over. Not a big fan of being cuddled just yet, but he certainly has interest in people.), appears to be litter trained although his previous owners said he wasn't, and not a destructive chewer for the most part (although I worked hard to make sure there was nothing obviously edible within reach of his running area in the bedroom). He has not been overly protective of his "house," either - and he certainly understands that it's his house, because he runs in there really fast if I try to pick him up. I've been able to move his "furniture" and get everything out for cleaning and refilling with food and litter as appropriate without any complaints.

Joelle, on the other hand, is going a little crazy with the facts that a) she is not allowed to go in my bedroom, which is her favorite place ever because there is so much trouble to get into there and b) she knows there's something - even somebody - in that bedroom who is smelling foreign and getting talked to in Ruth's rabbit voice and taking away from her Joelle-and-Ruth time. I can't let these two together because of Joelle's chronic Pasturella issue - that spreads fairly easily from bunny to bunny, and I would NOT want to be responsible for giving it to another rabbit!! Poor Joelle - she's a bit frustrated. She's also not too happy that the day before Boy Bunny arrived I had to chop out some blobs of fur around her face that I had ignored for too long and had turned into gigantic mats with much hay mixed in. :-( She spends a fair amount of her free time sulking now...

"grrrrrrr..." also, like that tape job on the wall, keeping the lamp cord safe from sharp bunny teeth...?

Okay, truly she's doing just fine, and I've been making sure to give her lots of attention and explain to her that we have to be nice to the little boy who has no mommy, and that means staying away from him. I don't think she quite understands this, but I have caught her looking out the sliding glass door quite often.

looking for another rabbit to come into the apartment, perhaps?

Anyhow - aren't they cute? Don't YOU want a rabbit? Especially since it's Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month??? If you do, please consider going to your local animal shelter and learning more about their rabbits and what they're looking for in an adopter!

And, if you happen to live in Pittsburgh, think about taking on Whatever His Name Is - The Animal Formerly Known As Bella Beatrice. Tafkabb? That might work! If you have any better name suggestions, please pass them along!

i'm looking for my name...have you seen it?

for my sweetie

All right, so I had to do something special and nice and loving for someone for Valentine's Day, and since I did not run into any homeless people (they, like 99% of the rest of the people of Pittsburgh, apparently were stuck inside due to the large downpour of sleet that turned into ice and encrusted cars and homes and then was covered with several inches of snow on Tuesday night, the night on which "D" was driving back to his home from a work trip, and I really hope he's okay even if I'm not in like with him!) and my glue ineptitude was never resolved...I de-iced my car and went to the store and bought some lovely treats for...Joelle! (Sheamus wasn't jealous. He has still not eaten. Nothing. Again, I do not know how he is alive. I now have it documented that he has not eaten since at least December... He does appear to have regained some of his up-right-ability, however. Maybe I need to go get some more brine shrimp to tempt him?)

Joelle got her regular assortment of greens including her favorites like dandelions and cilantro (my personal favorite), plus some new-to-her-palate Italian parsley and Swiss chard. And to top it all off...some edible flowers, including a rose or two.I was all excited about the flowers, but like any good, well-planned gift, the recipient was decidedly not interested in the special treat for which I had paid so much and invested much time to find. Joelle dumped the basket of greens on the floor and pulled out all the dandelions, chard, parsley, and cilantro. A few hours later she finally came back and ate up most of the flowers. Great.

I suppose it all goes to show that no matter how much a person cares, her gift is not necessarily going to be received with the message she meant to convey. Perhaps in many cases, a better strategy to relate one's affection would be to...simply say it.

at night

I had a really bad dream last night that Blogger got all crazy on me and started charging me for every photo I wanted to post (they also were offering pictures that you could buy to post onto blog entries, I guess just in case you didn't have any of your own or you wanted to appear to have way more friends that you really did or that you had travelled to an exotic island for vacation). I'm glad that this is not the case. Not that I have a lot of photos to post right now. But still.

Speaking of dreams, I have been sleeping an incredible amount recently. I first thought this was because I had experienced some insane work hours, but even after that I found myself not being able to drag myself out of bed until 9:30 on weekends (this is not normal). And so maybe it was because I was getting to sleep later than normal - which has been true. But even so, this past weekend I found myself sleeping between 10 and 12 hours a night! And still wanting a nap!

One of my biggest fears (and...in a sense - hopes, because I'm lazy) of life is that I will contract mononucleosis. That would completely wipe me out. It might be a good thing for me to be forced to take it easy for several months (it would certainly be lovely to have a great excuse to not work too hard and spend much time sleeping and knitting), but it's not terribly conducive to finishing a PhD thesis. I'm quite sure that my wanting to sleep so much has very little to do with the possibility of having mono. And being that in the past couple weeks I've become sort of a hypochondriac - having worried at various times that I have broken my finger, have some kind of terrible dermatologic disorder, have a congenital syndrome, or just plain carry bad genes - I am not taking my sleepiness too seriously, because it's most likely my imagination running away with me.

Actually, the tiredness is really most likely due to psychological stress and not consistently getting up at the same time every day. These are things I know full well how to deal with!

Anyway, a few bits and bobs I had begun blogging about but never finished posting earlier in the month are related...

You'd think I would have realized when I posted on January 2 that it was knitting day, especially because one of my knitting projects had everything to do with New Year's. But I didn't. I had many other things on my mind (see, for example, the parenthetical statement in that day's post), some of which were actually causing me to lose sleep because I'd lay (lie?) in bed at night and not be able to get my brain to stop thinking about them. But...I dealt with the majority of those things by the end of the day and was quite capable of drifting off to sleep - hooray!

The project I forgot to write about was the Nadia hat, which I had intended to make to wear for a New Year's celebration on the dunes of Lake Michigan. Obviously, I was in Pittsburgh for New Year's...and the hat is nowhere near being completed. BUT I did in fact make it to some dunes on Lake Michigan while I was visiting my parents, although it wasn't the original destination I had planned for the hat.Mom and I went to Rosy Mound Park, which has trails through both wooded and non-wooded dunes, and if you climb up the dune and on over...you get to Lake Michigan.I was pretty lame and didn't even have a single hand-knit item with me, but at least I got a picture of me at the beach in December!On another note, remember all those silly things I was doing? I was convinced they were because of thoughts of a person taking over my brain. However, what I did January 4 can't really be explained by such reasoning. (I instead blame lack of sleep.)

It was going to be a long day. Very long. I was up around 4 and ate, dressed, fed Joelle, packed up food and other essentials for the day, then drove to work. I worked. And worked. And worked and worked and worked. And finally, when I got home around midnight, I opened the apartment door and looked over at Joelle's cage as I normally do - she has a tendency to shake her cage when she is kept in it for a long time, in an effort to express her anger at being cooped up for so long, and I had been musing to myself on the drive home how far off its base the cage would be when I got home from the 18 hour work day.

To my utter surprise, I did not find the cage moved a centimeter from where it should be. However...

However, the door to the cage was wide open. Not only was it wide open, but it was clamped wide open, which meant that I had not ever closed the cage when I left in the wee hours of the morning, and that in turn meant that Joelle had achieved free range of the apartment for the entire long day! That is a very long time for a rabbit to destroy many, many, many things.

The first thing I checked was the lamp cords. There's only one that is accessible to a rabbit without climbing over a large object. All cords were fine.

Next, the couch. There's one favorite corner Joelle has tried to start nibbling, and I've put some blockades around it, but they're easily movable. Yet...the couch was fine.

I was getting a little scared because how likely was it that this critter truly didn't destroy anything?, and all the other things I could think of that were destructible were much more dear to me than the lamps. For example...my Fairly Easy Fair Isle cardigan sweater, which was laying in a heap on the bathroom floor - exceedingly easy prey for a mischevious rabbit!

Nope. Fine.

Everything was FINE. I couldn't believe it! (I also couldn't believe that I had forgotten to close the cage door.) I was very, very proud of my wonderful bunny for being so responsible even when I was not. Now, I'm certainly not going to make letting Joelle run around unattended become a habit, but it sure gave me a lot of respect for her. I gave her as many treats as I could allow myself to spoil her with and told her over and over again what a good, good rabbit she was. And I felt a bit guilty when I had to shut her in the cage the next morning knowing full well that it would be another very long day...

boofy bunny butt

When I was in high school I had the pleasure of having Mrs. Flynn as my English teacher for two years. Mrs. Flynn was enthusiastic and energetic, and I later found out that she had been a physiology major before she became an English teacher, and that's pretty darn interesting. Mrs. Flynn made her students work hard, but we also played hard with her - every now and then we'd have "tea and crumpets"!

One of the fondest memories of English class with Mrs. Flynn was the introduction of the word "boofy." I'm not positive that this is how it is properly spelled, but being that the word was presented in oral but not written form by Mrs. Flynn, I'm not sure it really matters. (I was, however, able to find it spelled that way via Google. See the picture here.) Mrs. Flynn used this word to describe her appearance: she had boofy hair. I knew exactly what she meant! If your hair isn't stick-straight, has a little bit of frizz and a little bit of wire...then you probably know what she means, too! It's sort of like when your hair...raises itself higher than it normally is.

It's like a combination of "big" and "poofy." I personally believe the word (if it's really a word) stems from "bouffant." The classic Jacqueline Kennedy picture gives the gist - it's just that boofy hair doesn't come from hours of styling - it just happens. Especially when there is a significant amount of moisture in the air.

All this comes into play, because poor Miss Joelle, who has been looking very sorry indeed recently - complete with a poly-collar to prevent her from scratching at the drains inserted into the side of her face for two weeks - finally got a haircut! However, it isn't complete yet. I cut from the neck towards the rump, and when I gave up (Joelle can't stand being groomed for an incredibly long time), she ended up with a bit of "boof" on her behind.


When I pointed this out to her, she gave a sniff and flopped onto her side by her favorite chair - just the perfect angle for me to get a picture of the bunny with a fur tutu!

Observe:
Now, Bethany, that is a very odd looking rabbit!

update in brief

...The blog has not been a priority in Somebody's life of late... That would be me. Apologies to all who are longing for a peek into my life.

What can I say? My brain has been stuffed with Other Items, mostly people (and a rabbit) and work. An odd combination, considering that I am usually all about only one or the other - life seems to shift between being 100% for work, overcommitting myself to it 24/7, or 100% for other people, putting less thought into my work and more thought into being with others. I've been trying to learn (and apply) a balance between the two. It's tough! Both require a lot of time and effort if they are to be done properly and with quality. And, obviously, other things thus get pushed aside.

Including knitting! Can you believe it? I have not knit for over a week! I have not even wanted to!! I had finished the knitting construction of Joelle's stocking sometime during the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the sock with the un-closed toe sat and sat and sat in the Knitting Bag for about 10 days. Finally I decided to sew it up on Sunday and hang it. Of course, now I'm not truly satisfied with it - I should have used a different size needle on the stranded knitting part - but I'm too lazy to un-do it and reknit, at least for this year.

I also have concluded that I am going to give up on the Aran sweater I've been making zero progress on for the past year. I love the yarn, I love the cables and double seed stitch, but when I think about it, I actually really do not love the pattern. It is a "traditional" Aran design - a "square" body with unshaped arm holes, and the sleeves stick straight out to form a T. And, goodness knows why and when this occurred in my unfashionable mind, I just don't want that sort of dumpy sweater! I want something more fitted. Something like I know I saw in a Vogue Knitting from I believe last year - it's somewhere in my Pile of Knitting Magazines. ...And that means I'm going to rip out some 16 inches worth of ribbing, cables, and textured knitting, which pains me to think about, considering I also painstakingly tubular-cast on the bottom edge of both the front and back sides of this particular project - a first for me, and something which took an entire evening to do properly!

...When I will get to that is anyone's guess!

bad things come in threes (or more)

Blogger won't publish the posts I painstakingly write these days. Hopefully this one makes it...

Bad things that have occurred in the past 12 hours:

• I found out my sister suffered a minor concussion this past weekend and is having continuous headaches as a result.
• A friend from high school was killed in a car accident
• Joelle, who had surgery for another abscess on Friday, stopped eating this morning and is acting very strangely

I don't feel much like celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow.

a second opinion

Well, after spending hundreds upon hundreds of dollars with a vet who first thought Joelle was a reject from the Angora rabbit farm because she was a chronic Pasteurella bunny who would suffer from random abscesses her whole life and then was sure Joelle had cancer in her face and should be put to sleep -- after that, and after the vet said that the big blob of necrotic and bloody tissue left on the side of Joelle's face looked "great" (and after never returning my Tupperware container and losing the thingy that hooks Joelle's water bottle to the side of her cage)...then I went to a different veterinarian.

Different Veterinarian was very calm. Different Vet said, "This is common." He showed me that the "great" looking blob was actually only attached by a 1/4 centimeter-wide piece of skin, and the blob was longing to come off and expose the still pus-filled opening that was (still - after a week of daily treatments and two weeks of antibiotic) The Abscess. With a tiny snip that Joelle didn't even notice, the blob was off, and the Different Vet took some surgical scrub and washed out the ooky pus that had reaccumulated in the area. He made sure Joelle didn't have tooth problems that were causing the abscess. He told me the weird bite-looking wound on Joelle's back wasn't another abscess (he was right - it hasn't gotten exponentially bigger this week at all) and was more likely a insect or spider bite. He said Joelle's previous antibiotic prescription dose was based on dog and cat norms and that she needed 2.5 times as much. But no surgery. He managed to get me the antibiotic for $17.

Yes, seventeen dollars. Not hundreds and hundreds. Seventeen dollars worth of antibiotic and a couple bucks worth of antiseptic with which to wash the abscess area for the next week, and that's it. That's the full treatment.

And I asked Different Vet when I should come back for a recheck, and he said I probably wouldn't have to because Joelle should be totally fine within the next 10 days. Yes, 10 days of antibiotics. Not 6 weeks as the previous vet had prescribed.

Now, I'm not saying that the old vet was wrong necessarily. Different vets have different styles. I just think that the old vet's means of dealing with the situation left me quite uncomfortable. And Different Vet certainly instilled huge amounts of confidence in his diagnosis and confirmed all that I had read and heard from other rabbit owners about Joelle's problem. And I also know that Joelle's abscess has looked better in the past two days than it has in the past 3 weeks.

I also think that Joelle's just happy that nobody's going to poke her anymore and that she still gets to take that yummy cherry-flavored antibiotic!Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers and encouragement. I'm pretty sure Joelle's out of the woods with this abscess thing now. Hooray!

In the meantime, she's also very happy to have acquired her own throne in the bathroom after bravely conquering the terrifying Slippery Cold Tile (and then naughtily peeing all over the bath mats).

Overall, I'd say she's doing fine. She's getting just a little sick of me taking pictures of her, though.

update on joelle

I don't feel much like writing about the goings-on with Joelle. Suffice to say that I got to take her home and she doesn't have cancer but doesn't appear to really have improved abscess-wise, which I'm not entirely pleased with. I'm going to make an appointment with a different vet who has treated cases like this before (which turned out very sadly for my pal Ruth in a similar situation).

:'-(

Joelle is, however, doing "okay" - eating, having normal digestion, although yesterday when I brought her home, she didn't drink at all during the night, which concerns me. That and the entire rest of the problem, including my discomfort with the vet and her treatment of this ailment, made it extremely difficult to fall asleep last night, and I think all in all I had about 4 hours of sleep. And strong coffee this morning. Stress is bad.

Anyhow, the funniest/saddest part is what the poor dear looks like now. It's rather frightening, actually, although it's simply a bunny with very little fur on her face (and a gigantic lump with oozing gook). Take a look:She appears rather like a baby alpaca (which, incidentally, I like (at least their yarn) - I just don't much like rabbits looking like baby alpacas).

And to think that merely a week ago she was a gigantic fur-ball...The hair will grow back, it will just take time - and I hope we still have a lot of that with this one!

i *heart* autumn

No knitting today because I left my camera with the pictures of my knitting at home, and it's really much more interesting to read about knitting when there are pictures.

Instead, a bit of musing on life and such...

Last night I was a wreck. I finally called the vet to find out what the situation was with Joelle since I hadn't heard anything since Thursday. Vet says that Joelle is acting great - eating, drinking, pooping, peeing, getting annoyed when people get into her personal space. Vet also says that when she opened up the re-abscess on Thursday, she was surprised to find not more pus but caseous tissue, which is what is often found in tumors. Oh ugh. So she sent a biopsy to be looked at to see if the Jose has cancer. Ugh, ugh. In the meantime, Vet will continue to wait for the bacterial culture to come back and will treat the abscess as planned.

So last night, with all this information (and absolutely no indication about when my bun will be able to come home to me) I started crying whenever I looked at the bunny candy and thinking about how I'd feed that to Joelle before I put her down if/when it came to that. After an hour or so of this, I decided to buck up and make the apartment clean and comfortable for Joelle when/if she came back. I cleaned all around her cage, cleaned the kitchen (not that she ever goes in the kitchen - she's not a big fan of the slippery linoleum), and then was vacuuming. And then the vacuum stopped vacuuming. And I don't know why.

Ugh.

I said, "FORGET IT!" and put away the vacuum and layed out layers and layers of comfortable towels in Joelle's now-very-clean cage and then went to bed.

And then, this morning, I woke up (wait - no, I woke up, snoozed and snoozed and snoozed and then finally rolled out of bed) and went about the morning routine of shower and breakfast and coffee, and I went outside to bring away the trash and realized...it's a beautiful day. It really, truly is. It's that crispy autumnish weather, where it's okay to be outside in a long-sleeved shirt, but it feels even better to come inside to a warm drink. The morning was untouched, untroubled, unbroken. So calming, so nice. No worries for the day as of yet. Joelle was still alive and was in (I think) good hands, and God hears my prayers, and there's light at the end of the tunnel. But beyond all that, it is a beautiful day. (So much so that I really want to leave work and go for a long, long walk in the woods, particularly since the after-five part of my day today isn't filled with very many happy activities.)

When I got to work I did some googling to see what I could find out about caseous tissue in rabbit abscesses, and it really seems like this is an absolutely normal phenomenon, which makes me a tad more concerned about Vet doing the vetting for Joelle, but I'm fairly certain that the biopsy will not be cancerous and that Vet is doing pretty much what I would desire any vet to do in this case (meaning the care of the patient, not the freaking out and jumping to outrageous conclusions about chronic Pasturella and cancer), and I think things will turn out okay.

Thus, my concluding thought is simply that I love autumn. It's a shame to be bogged down by other worries when there's so much to enjoy in a lovely day like today.