Entries tagged with bunny

I had a feeling this week was going to not go well. It just... went way downhill at once on Sunday night.

( Pet illness/death )

Anyway... Video of Boo doing the thing I miss most, as she did this every morning to greet me and every time I bent down to face her in "her" room. I've since moved Sage into that room, since she was in an enclosure in the living room (she is my smallest bun, and that enclosure was built to house three buns who were larger than she was) and now she has a room to herself again.

And I still have Oscar (which honestly is still mind-blowing after what happened last summer), Sage, Logan, and Milo - and as I told the vet and some others in the aftermath, as much as I miss my fierce little warrior girl, there's some other bun who will need me too, and since I can't have every bun in the world with me forever all at once, at least now I have room for one (or two) more when they cross my path.

...And as noted above, that was naturally the day I was supposed to have a new roof put on the house starting at 7am, so I had to get up at 6:30. They were not there by 7, or 8 when I called the vet, or at 11am when I left for the vet. My dad was arranging this and apparently the shingles and panels were going to be delivered around noon, and so the workers would arrive a little before that to start tearing the old roof off in preparation for the new shingles?

Well they showed up while I was at the vet, just in time to take a lunch break after doing other houses earlier this morning I guess. So I had to get up at 6:30, work, use a long lunch break for the most excruciating vet visit ever, and come home... and shortly after that I had people walking around on my roof banging on things and tearing things and using noisy power tools, while I was exhausted and dehydrated and stressed beyond belief, and trying to do my job, for the rest of the day. But I do at least have a new roof on the house now and hopefully the living room ceiling will no longer leak every time it rains.

But that was my Monday and just... screw any intentions I had.

I had planned to basically take a week of hiatus from even trying to write anything remotely seriously, especially more moonsky, because I am enjoying myself but I feel like I'm pissing off all but like 4 people in the fandom, because nearly every other fic being posted is Kotetsu/Barnaby smut (or the occasional fluff) which all gets dozens of hits/kudos within a couple hours, so it's obvious what the fandom actually wants to see. And unlike Vagrant Story, there are actually people looking for fics in the Tiger & Bunny section on a daily basis so there are people who might actually be annoyed by my rarepair nonsense.

But since I was stressed and miserable and needed distraction I wound up working far more seriously than I had intended on this self-indulgent idea I had about... well, heh, one of the few other moonsky fics out there had Yuri and Keith get together after Yuri (having a sweet tooth and all) can't resist the pudding cups at a party and Keith drives him home, hahahah. And while that is a cute/amusing idea and makes sense in the context of that fic, my immediate thought was "Oh gosh no. No, Yuri accidentally getting drunk would be a very, very bad idea if it was the Yuri I write, and it would not be cute or amusing for very long at all. What a disaster. ...Oh hey, I like to write disasters."

Well due to stress I basically just let the "self-indulgent" idea go straight to the iddiest idfic ever with as much h/c and tropes and Keith being Goodest Boi as possible so... I mean I obviously am pleased with it? But it's so idtastic that it kinda veers around like "lulz->uh-oh->oh noooooo->awwwwww->lulz" so I have no idea if I should post it. :P

( But here's an excerpt from the 'awwww' portion anyway, I guess, in which Keith is the poster boy for understanding consent )

Throwing in one from last week that was not actually for Kiss Battle but in the spirit of Kiss Battle too. ;)

Duty Over Dreams, FFV; In which Lenna has a little time alone with her sister before Faris escapes ahead of a royal ball which is no doubt going to be annoying.

Of No Consequence, FFXII; In which a late-teenage Al-Cid turns his charm on someone unexpected at a masquerade ball, and, uh, it works out well enough...?

To Fly Again, FFV; In which I make up some things about Krile's parents because apparently no one knows anything about them, and after their disappearance Galuf bonds with his granddaughter.

...I have gotten a lot done on the Müllenkamp costume in the last week but I am too freaking exhausted to spend the time uploading images to imgur and getting links and embedding them so maybe later.

I actually thought briefly on Thursday that I was going to do some dye experiments this weekend because I'm running out of things I can do other than the veils really. But then I remembered Saturday was the Johto Tour in Pokemon Go, and therefore the entire day was going to be eaten by that, ideally out of the house for much of it, and then Sunday was going to be eaten by my body punishing me for it. ...Right on both counts. :P Woke up at 7:30 yesterday, left the house around 8:40, got home around 2:30, went out again for a bit just before 9 to get the trades in so I could 100% finish all of the research.

(Complicating matters: my friend who I usually arrange PoGo stuff with, who had chosen silver while I chose gold so we could trade the version-exclusive stuff, sprained her ankle Friday night apparently. But she did eventually get out, completed everything but the trades, then we met up as planned and I told her that she kicked all kinds of butt for actually managing to get the entire event done despite the night before having a wrench thrown in the plan. I would not have blamed her if she wanted to sit it out, and had a back-up trader arranged in case, but she came through and darned if I was going to be the reason she didn't finish!)

And then I woke up today with my legs aching and wobbly and my guts have been throwing fits because I was sitting up in a car for so long between walking around (in 20 degree weather and 15mph wind; I spent a lot of time sitting in the car). And had to rearrange bunny spaces because while I was out yesterday morning, Milo realized he could jump the baby gate, and enjoyed doing so again in the middle of the night, therefore causing me to get up repeatedly. -_- I love my buns and would not go without them but ugh, sometimes they are too precocious for their own good, or my sanity.

So now he is in a room (I hope he finds something he likes as much as he liked the toilet) and Logan is in the stairwell where he and his brother lived for awhile when they first came to live with me. I really hope that eventually I can bond Milo with someone so they can share space - the stairwell is a big enough space and offers some interest for a bun (well, assuming the bun in question isn't afraid of stairs) in the form of climbing, but since I don't use the front door ever, it also isn't somewhere I normally would be if not for a bunny being there. I like having all my kiddos be somewhere that I will pass by them for casual petting several times a day.

More amusing, Milo being placed in a WHOLE ROOM BY HIMSELF looked a little bewildered, so I was like "Whatcha gonna do with all that room...?" And my brain automatically added "...All that room to do your zoom?" ...My dumb brain.

Work this week was frustrating and miserable (it involved moving a thing I was doing in an external app into testing once I added a bunch of people into the user list and gave them permissions... except last weekend the external app pushed a major update, and they added different kinds of permissions that I did not automatically have but would need in order to add people to the user list, let alone grant them permissions; I literally had nightmares over the weekend about getting more emails going "it still didn't work") and I forgot half my Saturday would be eaten by Pokemon Go community day, plus I messed up the paint job on some of my costume pieces...

Also still frustrating but also cute and whimsical was the further adventures of the new bun, who apparently is named Milo after some debate. I woke up at 5am a couple nights ago and found him in the bathroom sink, pulling things off the counter around it into the sink with him. -_- So last night before bed I had to clear all that stuff off to bunnyproof the freaking SINK. And while finishing up around 12:30am, knocked a shelf down, which broke a ceramic toothbrush holder... which was empty because my toothbrush was one of the things he dragged into the sink with him, but I had to clean that up.

I still managed to do a little work on the costume, and would have all kinds of great stuff to show off, except that messing up the paint was a setback, and also I woke up today with a headache which vanished quickly after half an hour... then came back harder and has remained all day and it's hard to concentrate on anything between that and the nonstop reflux. (I think caffeine would help it, whether it's caffeine withdrawal or a migraine, but my reflux is already bad enough.)

But, well, there's stuff in progress, and drying, and maybe I'll make a costume progress post once that stuff is ready and I can take pics of how far along I should have been if not for the paint mishap and this headache.

And fic? Well... I did not touch anything that I already had in progress. And I don't know what this thing is that I wrote, whether it's a very short (under 1k) one-shot or if it wants to be the beginning of something longer. Cause see, I was too stressed out to write the stressful things I had in progress, and wanted fluff. Also threewalls writing a "they lived" post-canon AU has had me thinking of my own "they lived" post-canon AU and some of the stuff that showed up in my own headcanon over the years but was not specifically addressed in that story. And I'd kind of like to examine how those conversations would go.

But I had no context for those, so instead I just wrote some post-canon AU fluff that certainly happened between the last real scene and the epilogue of That Which Remains.

( Is this a first scene? Is it complete? Is it one in a series of very short vignettes ala The Heretics' Story, but set in this AU? Who knows? )

I thought I was going to maybe get some good stuff done on fic, cosplay, or both this weekend now that the new bun seems to be almost entirely recovered from that potentially stress-borne bout of stasis. (Ate all his pellets last night, overnight! The best he'd managed previously was eating most of them over the course of an entire day. Also, he ate his first treats - spinach leaves. =))

Buuuut... turned out that an art exhibit I'd been wanting to see since photos of it started turning up a few years back, which was currently part of a winter festival in a city about 50 miles north of me directly up an interstate highway? I'd thought it was going to be there until the festival ended in March. I had another look at the site for the festival yesterday morning after someone in Pittsburgh posted about going to the last night of the installation there, and discovered that oof - this exhibit seems to be January only, then headed to Dubai. So if I didn't go up this weekend (or tomorrow night after work), I wouldn't get to see it.

So last night in spite of not feeling well, I wound up driving up to Grand Rapids - with a bunny. ;) Boomer is my least well-behaved rabbit, but she doesn't mind car rides, or a leash and harness, and actively enjoys playing in the snow, so given the temperatures and the recent car-induced trauma on a different rabbit, she seemed like my best bet if I wanted to take a rabbit with me. So off we went, and in front of the Ford Presidential Museum along the river... :D

Giant inflatable bunnies? You know I'd been wanting to see those in person.

I did not take as many pictures, or as quality, as I would have liked to, mostly because I was on my own wrangling a wiggly bunny in such cold temps that I couldn't have my gloves off for long to adjust settings on my phone's camera without causing actual PAIN. Also I kept getting people stopping to exclaim "look, she has a REAL bunny!" and so I got to talk about my naughty girl a little bit. Told people her name is Boomer, because she likes to make things go boom. :D And in spite of her being okay with snow and cold temps, it was way colder than I would have wanted her to be out in for long, and with me also not feeling well and only making the drive because it was then or never... :P But still. I finally got to see the giant light-up inflatable rabbits I had been fascinated by since they started being shown around the world. :D

Anyway. Müllenkamp costume managed to progress a little bit because I found my last cans of the good primer and the good gold spray paint on Thursday, and turns out there was enough left in both to cover the pendant I'd cast out of resin. And I'd already found a way to do the collar...

( My best reference, and the results. )

And since I needed something to do while adhesive/clearcoat was drying that would take my mind off my nerves about trying to actually leave the house and drive with my car still giving warning signals and me not feeling great while temps were in the teens, with a bunny... yesterday afternoon I pulled up the "what Callo and Hardin were doing during the last battle" text file and tried to get some more done on that. Today too.

And given my habit of naming my VS fics after Pink Floyd lyrics (hey, Matsuno's got a thing for Queen so it's fair game), it occurred to me that I may actually be able to use the first line of one of my favorites for this one. "The Day the Wall Came Down" is, er, quite fitting in a literal sense.

( But we'll see how this goes. )

I planned to post last night about my adventure yesterday morning/afternoon. Drove to Toledo to meet up with writer_lilies, who through her job had gotten word of a bunny whose owner had fallen on hard times and had to surrender him, and would I be willing to give him a new loving home? And it's only a two hour drive and actually the place was right along the route I usually take to DC/Baltimore for various conventions, so I knew the area pretty well and got to go in and meet a handsome boy who was coming home with me, and also hug a friend I hadn't seen in a few years. :D

And all that was great. I took pictures. (He has decided he is not only not afraid of bare floors like most rabbits, but he likes the bathroom and particularly the area behind the toilet once he's pulled out everything that was back there. XD Also, witness my doofus cat being a doofus in the most catlike possible way. I love him, but he is a doofus.) I gave some people who had asked for updates their requested updates, then went to feed the pets dinner...

And this new bun did not want to eat. Not pellets, not treats. And it occurred to me he hadn't pooped all day (buns pretty much constantly poop and when they don't, it's a problem). I don't know if it's a dietary change from what he's used to, or the car ride stressed him out, but he didn't want food or water, and long story short, he was pretty clearly in early stage stasis. Which is a common bunny thing, but I have therefore spent the last 16 hours syringe-feeding him every few hours and cautiously administering other rabbits' leftover prescription meds. He is still energetic (my bathrobe is covered in splattered critical care) and just ate a little bit of oats, and he did poop a little overnight, but we are not out of the woods.

So that's been my weekend. That and my car having 4 different warning lights pop up on the dashboard while I was driving home from OH. Two of them have since disappeared, one disappeared when I filled up the gas tank this afternoon but has appeared again just now so... sigh. I may be in the market for a new car after all.

Blahblah. Been so busy preparing to welcome a new bun, and then caring for new bun in a panic, that I haven't actually done much writing since that snippet I posted earlier this week. But I did do a little more with that.

( And the earthquakes haven't even started yet. )

I get the feeling I will be spending more time here for awhile because "mainstream social media" is full of... well. You guys no doubt know what's been going on today in the news and I physically cannot deal with any more rage. (At least BBB passed and we all got to laugh at McCarthy being a complete clown show for awhile.)

Because this week was another of those weeks.

( CW for poop. Because poop is a pretty important thing with bunnies. )

And naturally this was during a week when the insanity of the last couple weeks at work spilled over yet again and I had stuff coming at me from all directions and I am very glad I work from home because at 4pm Wednesday my boss messaged me to ask if I could get in touch with someone who was needing help with a thing, and it was the same system I have been helping three other people with for the last couple weeks, and I pretty much just lost it between worry about Sage and the unbearable pain I was also in at the moment. Because I have a good boss I am able to just go "Can that be tomorrow, because I cannot focus on things more complex right now than 'please replace this file with this other file' and 'please remove these paragraphs because the date of this event has passed'?"

But I did get in touch Thursday morning and took care of it with the last of my work hours and then weekend began, and I don't really know what I did with the rest of yesterday because I was still in so much pain. (Honestly vaguely wondering if this is not a migraine but a brain tumor, but if so, "oh well".)

And still am, but it snowed overnight and I made myself go take a walk around the woods. Which brought the migraine back, but darnit I hadn't had the time or energy to walk the trails all week. So I was going to walk the trails. And then I could come back and lie down in a warm waterbed in a warm house and snuggle warm bunnies and be harassed by a warm cat who refuses to not sit directly on me. And have coffee (not warm because apparently hot drinks make my esophagus seize up now? Good thing I like it iced), which was nice because I couldn't have some for a few days due to all the driving around. Couldn't eat or drink anything until I was done driving/talking for the day if I wanted it to stay down. (I am so dehydrated.)

And last night I managed to get back to writing on the Ashley/Tia fic, which I hadn't touched since Sunday due to work/bunny drama. And I just finished chapter 9! (Note: Rosencrantz is still the worst, though the last bit made me understand him just enough to feel a little sorry for him. He does canonically talk about how he didn't like being "used" to do the dirty work of the rich and powerful. But again, he could just choose not to be terrible, and instead he basically doubles down.)

Not sure if I want to start in on chapter 10, or write one of the two shorter things that have been floating around in my head the last couple days.

1: Finally thought of a scene that would fit the current prompt at FFW, and one that I would definitely enjoy writing if I was in the right mood for it. But I'm in too much pain to really be in the right mood for anything delicate and complex right now, and also it is a scene that likely should go into (or alongside) the old "Sydney's life before becoming the high priest" fic that I only barely started rewriting after it sat untouched for 10 years. Not sure I can make it a standalone. But I think the prompt closes tomorrow, so if I'm going to do something this round...

2: Much more "fun" and less tricky, another idea - there's that scene in canon where Callo basically discovers she's a telepath now because she can see Hardin saying the thoughts he won't say aloud, and Hardin stops her by stabbing himself in the thigh to break his own train of thought. (Hardcore! I do love that man. <3) ...Except that for fic purposes and headcanon reasons, that doesn't last very long, because he's kind of used to pain. And Callo observes that "Hmm, that really didn't slow you down much." Which, thanks to the pain not being distracting enough, leads to her getting some information about Sydney that she was really, really NOT trying to get out of Hardin, and she's not sure she likes being a heartseer. XD

For those with such leanings, another short prompt-based Sydney/Hardin (okay essentially gen but still) ficbit. I had this pop into my head immediately when the prompt was "protection", but something was going on that round, maybe that was when Oscar got sick, I can't recall... but for whatever reason, even though it was right there in my brain, I never got it any further before the round ended. So hooray for amnesty rounds, I guess.

( Speaking of Oscar... )

( And speaking of Vagrant Story fic... )

Among assorted things to catch up on posting about is the pets. I did a post last year with at least a picture and brief description of everyone living with me, which is now somewhat outdated. (And let me tell you, I thought I'd reached peak Disney Princess status when a friendly frog randomly appeared in my house and then I had chipmunks hanging around me while I was planting things in the yard and a cat appeared out of the berry vines to keep me company for a few weeks as I was weeding the roses and I was feuding with a particular local squirrel over the fruit of a walnut tree, but the other day I was genuinely concerned for the large spider I've allowed to live above my kitchen sink for the better part of a year because she was acting strangely, and then I realized the fact that I could tell that a spider was acting strangely was perhaps a little absurd.) At some point I should post about all the new kids, including Benji, who is no longer with us after a sudden and severe bout of GI stasis that got him overnight last summer before I could get him to the vet, despite my getting up numerous times to massage his gut, give him fluids, and even once a little leftover pain medication from Pepper's abscess treatment earlier that year because he was clearly hurting so much.

...But happier news. I still have my dear sweet Pepper, who is as ridiculous as ever, and very bouncy when she is not flopped down in her sleeping box to supervise my doings, despite her age. And my second-oldest bun is Boomer, who I posted some backstory of previously.

( Pics, of course, as well as the tale of the advent of Queen Boo. )

I really want to get in the habit of posting here again, especially given how much I *loathe* Facebook and its inability to facilitate the kind of online communication I actually enjoy, but I have just been feeling way too crappy in multiple ways to actually put together anything coherent that's longer than a couple paragraphs, which is what FB is basically for, which is what I hate about it, but yeah.

But a couple days ago I was alerted to the fact it was National Pet Day, by a woman a couple hours north who I've adopted four rescue bunnies from now, who was also the one who got me in the habit of going around every morning first thing and starting the day by greeting each pet and giving them good morning kisses. One of the very few people I have ever met who loves animals the way I love animals - it's wonderful to have found another kindred spirit in that regard. And she posted to her rescue group and was like "Everyone post pics of you and your pets in comments!" So when I did the morning rounds, I took the camera, and everyone behaved. Though two of the kiddos are sick at the moment, so Pepper is not happy about being picked up and Elizabeth's poor cheek is swollen up, and Boomer is just generally fierce and hard to get a picture WITH so I had to photobomb her after a moment of near-affection was broken up by Baxter jumping into the room and startling her into attacking him.

But I figured I could at least share the pics of the nine - yes, I now have NINE - critters I live with because even though everything else is falling apart in the world, at least I know I've got these wonderful little kiddos. (And never mind how awful I look after just having rolled out of bed to give everyone those morning kisses...)

( Meet the family... )

Because I just posted about it at the pride thread, and wanted to include pics, so I uploaded them, and why not share here too, right?

( The concept here is: Bunnies are not sweet, innocent, eager-to-please creatures; this is what an actual bunnygirl would be like. )

Now this is a story all about how my life got flip-turned upside-down... or not. As was the case for the last part of last year, I keep not posting here because I feel like blogging in such a context demands good storytelling, and I just haven't had the spoons OR the inclination to be a good storyteller about things that just plain suck.

So I didn't post about what was going on with me, because it was all horrible. And then a few good things started happening, but I would've had to explain that they were good in contrast with the horrible things, which meant explaining the horrible things, and I couldn't do that.

But I want to start posting again, so here's the cliff's notes version of how things have gone in the last 5-6 months:

- Lost my Jasmine-bunny to extended illness
- Three days later, woke up to find Button-kitty's body
- A couple days later, Youmacon was a decent but brief distraction, and proved that I really have some good friends
- Lost Dusty-bunny a couple weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, so suddenly that the vet had just sent him home 15 minutes before his death with some antibiotics and "I don't know what's going on, let's see him again next week for some tests"
- HATED EVERYTHING, Thanksgiving and the rest of 2014 can just go screw itself RIGHT NOW thank you
- Wound up adopting another bunny on the Solstice - a bun who was in need of a patient owner because he was very aggressive, named Bruiser
- Noticed "he" was pulling out his fur a few days later and making a nest in my underwear drawer; flipped "him" over and confirmed - girl bunny, since renamed Boomer (because "Bruiser" seemed unfitting for her, but she does kind of make everything go boom)
- This is sort of a significant problem because getting a girl-bun fixed is about $300 more expensive than getting a boy-bun fixed, and my finances were about to get seriously awful...
- My boss is seriously amazing and gave me a "holiday bonus" out of his own pocket because I don't get holiday pay and since I work for a college, winter break means two weeks without the ability to draw a paycheck; he and one of my "con friends" (who are better than most of those people would say are my "real friends", but I'll get there) who sent me a super fitting present despite my protests and insisted that I deserved it pretty much single-handedly are responsible for me not entirely hating on the Christmas season, though random strangers on Gaia Online, of all the sites, helped too
- Got health insurance, which basically destroys my monthly budget even with the government subsidy, but was hoping it would be worth it to see a doctor who might prescribe me something for my most pressing issues
- Doctor doesn't understand my pressing issues and has done nothing but try to refer me to a specialist who isn't covered by my insurance and thus I can't afford to see him on top of the monthly premiums I'm already paying
- Katsucon happened; that was actually freaking AMAZING and I have the best friends in the world and they pretty much restored any hope I had that my life might be something other than terrible again someday
- One of them, I'm not sure which, gave me some sort of respiratory con plague and they were still worth it even though I still feel kind of weak a month later

So yeah. That's what's been going on with me, and why I haven't been posting here. So much frustration in my life I just don't want to go into detail on. Little sentence-long updates to people on FB who have demonstrated care for me as stuff happened on a daily basis? Sure. Posting stories and anecdotes on a blogging platform where it's kind of like shouting into the void? Not enough spoons in the world.

But for the last week and a half I've had an interesting new project that has been so interesting I find myself wanting to blog about the whole thing. And now that I've given a basic outline of where I'm at with my life (old pets gone, new pet acquired, cons attended, finances and health entirely screwed, but at least I have awesome friends and coworkers), I kind of feel like maybe I can get back to just posting casually about stuff that happens. Like this new project. Which has been really frustrating/fun/terrifying/rewarding, so it's going to get its own entry once I have the spoons for it. May include pictures, even.

Naturally the week of ACen, my job would dump a whole bunch of new stuff on me. Fortunately none of it is especially time-sensitive (in fact, two things were just proposals, one with the suggestion of setting up a meeting sometime in July), but still. I've been plugging away at the most time-sensitive one (financial aid forms), and have everything that they've given me so far updated except the two most tedious documents. Every year when I see the filenames for these two documents, I honestly cringe because "AAAUGH I HAVE TO DO *THOSE* AGAIN".

(And then on top of that, last year they eliminated one of the grant positions that was filled by one of the two people who vacated the part-time positions that L. and I got, and I felt bad about that because they could have still had a job if they hadn't vacated my position... and then today I just about had a heart attack when Mini-boss emailed me with a subject line of "I couldn't keep all the grant positions" and the email wouldn't open right away due to lag, and I panicked even after the thing FINALLY opened until I had read it all and remembered that my position is NOT a grant position, and what he was actually informing me and L. about was that the other person who had vacated our position was being let go this year. And this is a TERRIBLE idea, and I'd be upset about this even if there wasn't a measure of guilt too, because R. is made of awesome and does so much for the department, and losing her will leave a huge gaping hole... Mini-boss and Area Boss have been fighting to be able to keep her on even on a year-by-year basis, but people are being stubborn, and R. might not even WANT to stay after all this now.)

But I've got everything I can do for the job BUT those two files taken care of, so I'm taking a break to post about something much nicer: Bunnies!

I hadn't been posting too much about the kids, which is sad, because there's all kinds of cool stuff we've been learning about Bear as he acclimates to our household, and his disinterest in basil has caused me to better learn the tastes of our other buns as we try "stuff that is not basil" on the rest of them too (turns out neither Pepper or Dusty like basil all that much either), and then the dandelions blooming in our yard means that not only do we have pics of Bear on his first outing to the back yard, but Dusty is SO INCREDIBLY HAPPY now that I had to make an image macro commemorating his first taste of dandelions for the year:



Oh hey, and that reminds me, did I ever share this one of Bear looking extraordinarily grumpy?



...Anyway, I have mentioned in the past that Jasmine (the cutie in the current icon, smallest and oldest of our buns) does not get along with other rabbits. She has attacked every other rabbit she's been introduced to on sight. She's aggressive enough in general that she will nip my ankles if I don't bring her her dinner when she's used to getting it. But darnit, we would have a MUCH easier time of caring for our rabbits if at least a couple of them would get along, and she hadn't been introduced to Bear yet. So despite being kind of reluctant to expose such a sweetheart as Bear to her growling and biting and lunging, we got them into the neutral location of the library, and I held Jasmine still while Bear hopped around.

Well, she thumped some when he came over to have a sniff at her, but didn't try to break free and kill him, so that was something. And a little later, we held HIM still, and let her roam around the room to investigate stuff, eventually including him. And she thumped again, and hopped away. And that was all. Extremely undramatic compared to what I was expecting. So I dared to let them both run around the library without either being held...

Bear was very curious about Jas, and occasionally would hop over to check her out, and she'd thump and hop away. But this was instead of turning and lunging at him, so we allowed it to a degree, shooing him away every now and then so she would have some time to calm down. And since he wasn't insisting on either attacking or humping her, he was okay with being shooed away. In fact, eventually we had to move to a smaller area because they would just be off in their own corners doing their own thing, so we tried switching who was living in which cage a couple times, to get each other used to being in each other's spaces, then blocked off part of the hallway and set them up in there for a closer meeting. Still no incidents, so we moved them into my room.

That was a week ago. The first night, I separated them while I slept, because Jas was still kind of spooked. The second night, I didn't bother.

There has been not a single incident of violence between them. The worst that happens is that sometimes Bear wants to hump her, and she hops away, and he follows, and she keeps hopping away until he decides he's not THAT interested. Once this went on long enough that I decided Bear needed a time-out, so I put him in the cage and closed the door while Jas had the run of the rest of the room. And you know what Jas did? She came over and sat right next to the closed cage door, settling down nose-to-nose with Bear through the bars. This is after he had been chasing her around the room for like ten minutes straight.

I'm constantly waking up or walking in to find them sitting together, maybe one of them grooming the other, maybe getting a drink or munching on hay side by side. It is so amazingly cute, and given Jasmine's temperament and behavior towards other rabbits up until now, downright miraculous.

Initially I was thinking if they showed any promise at all as a bonded pair, I'd just give them a few minutes together every day for awhile, gradually increasing, maybe move them into adjacent rooms with a gate between so they could see each other without being in direct contact. Probably this would happen at some point after ACen, and in a few months, maybe we could even leave them together for awhile when supervised.

Now we're leaving for ACen tomorrow, and I'm really thinking we shouldn't separate them. They've done great with or without supervision, and the way Jasmine went to sit with Bear when he was having his time-out for annoying her seems to indicate that they've already formed something of a bond. I don't want to mess that up and then have to try to recreate it... I mean, just look at this cuteness (captured via my 3DS, because it's usually closer than my real camera):



And speaking of photos, have some unrelated photo updates!

Since I posted the pics of my purple-streaked hair, I have also dyed red and green streaks into it as well for rainbowy hair! :D I still want to add more color... almost looking forward to this stuff fading so I can try some different things.

New character design was released a week or so ago for Kotetsu, for Tiger & Bunny - The Rising. Naturally I threw it together for ACen. XD

After uh, actually not much discussion at all, it's been all but officially decided that the new bunny's name is Bear. He's just so dark and thick and his paws are HUGE, and he has this growly little grunt that he does almost constantly as he's running around... Also, he thinks he's a carnivore and goes after the cat food. :P Have to put the cat dishes up when he's out running around.

I took him to the vet Monday, and everything seems to be fine with him - it probably helps that he's the only one of our current four rabbits who wasn't found outside by the side of the road. He may even have come from a fairly reputable breeder - though he's made it abundantly obvious by this time that he's not fixed and desperately needs to be. ;)

But here's what you really want, no doubt... Pictures!

( Bear bunny! )

So far we've not intentionally introduced him to the other buns. Since Jasmine may not be fixed, and he definitely isn't, we're not introducing them until after they've both been fixed - which is scheduled for Feb. 20th, right after we get back from Katsucon. (Also the same day that Suzanne Vega is playing at the community college I work for! :D :D :D I was so excited to find this out - she's one of my top lyricists EVER.) Figure he might be a little too interested in Pepper until he's fixed, too...

And then there's Dusty. Since both boys are in the basement, they've sort of crossed paths. Dusty the escape artist busted out of his cage the other night, and I came downstairs to TONS of territorial poops surrounding the new boy's cage. Sigh. Later on, Dusty was out running in one basement room, Bear was out running in the room next to it, and I opened the door... and Bear tried to follow me in. Dusty ran over, Bear rushed forward, I got my feet in between them, and I was highly relieved when Dusty sank his teeth in to MY SKIN and held on, because it meant he wasn't latched on to Bear. That would not have been a good first encounter. I managed to grab Dusty and pick him up, shoo Bear out of the room with my feet, and then close the door behind me before putting Dusty down again. Ever since, if both of them are out in their respective rooms, I go the long way around, through the two doors in and out of the laundry room. Absolutely no chance of a bunny sneaking in to get at the other that way.

Bear also had not seemed interested in the fresh basil that the other buns adore so much, so we bought him some mint. He definitely likes that better (meanwhile Dusty turns his nose up at it), but I also look forward to trying cilantro (easily grown in a sunny window, much like basil) and spinach (a favorite of a couple past buns) and come spring, fresh dandelions and dandelion greens from the yard. I suspect he may have a sweet tooth. ;)

So uhm. Less than 24 hours after learning that he may exist, we have a new bun.



Basically my aunt (who let me know when a friend of hers found Pepper) was at a shelter the other day and saw a bunny in the kennels near the small dogs. And last night left a comment on Facebook like "Yeah, I didn't call you the other day when I saw this grey lop bunny at the shelter because I know you hate phones" and I was like "WTF I LOVE BUNNIES MORE THAN I HATE PHONES, MORE INFO PLZ".

So despite the shelter being halfway across the state, well. Rabbit. In a shelter that is not a no-kill shelter. And I'd thought for awhile I might like to have a lop sometime, but the rabbits who were most in need of our help were not lops, and I have a soft spot for grey buns because the grey buns I've known have been real sweethearts. But the shelter's site and Facebook page didn't have a grey lop bun mentioned anywhere, so we kept calling this morning and afternoon until we finally confirmed that there was an adoptable rabbit at the shelter, and it was a grey lop rather than the white rabbit that Petfinder turned up. (Not that we wouldn't have also adopted a white rabbit, but my aunt mentioned a grey lop, so we were confused as to what the rabbit situation was. They also had a small dutch female, who we met while there, and she was adorable, but she wasn't adoptable yet.)

As soon as we confirmed his existence, we grabbed a carrier and some fresh basil and set out on a lengthy drive through the falling snow. Because bunny.

Just finished assembling his cage, and he's now settled down to have a drink and munch on some hay - and oh, the way he reacted to the bunnyluv oat blend hay. It's standard fare for our rabbits, but I'm pretty sure he'd never had anything that good in his life, given the way he pounced on it when we got him into the carrier. Only a few minutes earlier, he'd been so terrified he was shaking. They'd had him in with the small dogs because the cat kennels were full of 57 rats they'd rescued a few days ago (yes, 57 rats, holy crap I hope whoever was responsible for this is getting their butt prosecuted) and had nowhere else to put him. But the dogs were loud and barking constantly and there was the dog smell, and he was cowering in the back of his own kennel and trembling. He calmed down a lot once we just grabbed him and took him out of that area into a quieter area, and I hated having to send him back there even just long enough for us to fill out the paperwork. But after that, he'd never have to go back there again.

He perked up a lot once we got home and he wasn't moving or surrounded by barking dogs, and when placed on a lap, was curious enough to want to explore rather than stay put... until I reached out to pet him, and he settled right down to tooth-purr over the petting. Such a sweetheart.

( Couple more pics! )

I adore him so much already. We just need to find him a name now... for some reason "Toby" came to mind, but I dunno. We'll see how his personality develops as he gets used to living with us.

Everyone here is asleep but me.


Top row to bottom row, left to right: Gracie, Elizabeth, Pepper, Jasmine, Dusty, Baxter, Button.

Me, I'm actually making a new menu for a page at work. While flat on my back (not a good health day), but still...