Wow - where did October go? Hm, well, here it is November 10 already and I suddenly have two teenagers as Elizabeth (the younger) turned 13 on November 8. The party is going to be held Sunday, a sleepover with six girls. Monday is a holiday, so we can sleep the next day if kept awake all night.
Life with 17 house bunnies continues to be highly entertaining. Little buggers have been on a chewing spree lately, have to replace a couple more electrical cords plus the living room curtain cord is looking precariously thinned in one spot. I went wild and bought several sets of chewy things from a mail-order firm specializing in bunny stuff, Leith Petworks. They were having a 10% off sale... so I got some specialty hays (two sample packs of four types of hay), five bags of pinecones, several different chew toys, willow wreaths and a couple of bob-toys, somewhat like Weebles(R). All are prooving popular, except for when humans step on them, most bunny chew things being hard and wooden. Ouch!
In the 'that would have been a cute picture' category - four out of five baby bunnies stretched out side by side in front of the radiant heater with one baby bunny stretched out on the other side, all basking in the heat. Of course, since the digital camera download cord has been neatly snipped in half, I can't download the camera until the replacement cord arrives. Silly bunnies.
Excitement coming up... John and I are off to Quesnel in B.C.'s chilly, snowy interior November 20th for John's surgery on the 21st, back home on the 22nd. Ten months and a day after injuring his right hand, he's having the index finger amputated. It was initially pinned and stitched back together, although he lost the joint just above the knuckle, but having healed as much as it's going too, it's obvious it's too badly damaged to do anything much except get in the way. Hard decision though; as John pointed out, after 50 years he's kind of attached to that finger.
And that's about it for now.

So, what have I been doing for the past six weeks or so? Not a whole bunch, hence not posting. Been doing the back to school routine, buying supplies, new clothes, getting the kids up in the morning. Both in high school now, yay!

John got put on night shift last week, which is a bit of a pain. Reduces the morning crunch, as otherwise everyone would be trying to get out the house between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m., but means he leaves for work at about 3:45 p.m. and doesn't get home until around 2:30 a.m. The kids don't get to see him at all except on the weekends, unless he's still awake when they get up around 5:30-6:00 a.m.

We have a new-to-us dining table, courtesy of a friend of mine who was replacing her dining room set. Moved the old table into the kitchen, need to juggle everything around a bit more until I'm happy with it.

The bunnies are doing their thing, running around, babies getting bigger - and cuter! Have to upload some new pictures of them all. Tomorrow.

The start of the school year means the start of Parent Advisory Council (PAC), District PAC, and all those other fun meetings. Got things going by attending part of the Haida Education Council meeting on Wednesday. Whew! The meeting moved along fairly quickly, but still ran from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Surprised me how many different initiatives are happening in the district. My current focus is trying to improve PAC meeting turnouts, which is of course why when I got home later that afternoon, having stopped to buy groceries en route, I skipped that evening's Port PAC meeting. Having just 90 minutes notice of it happening didn't help, but being in a meeting all afternoon meant the last thing I wanted was to head right into another meeting.

I did manage to make the 'meet the teachers' event on Thursday in Queen Charlotte, completely by accident. Had to collect Elizabeth from her volleyball practice, so there I was at the school a little before 5 p.m. and there were the principal and vice-principal busy grilling hamburgers and others busy setting up a buffet. Nice. Wandered around and met most of the kids teachers while scarfing down a hamburger and then headed home, back to the quiet life.

One thing I really enjoy about internet access is the huge number of on-line media sites. My morning standard is to check Google News Canada, which gives me an immediate take on what's hot for the news media, as news items are ranked by prevalence.

Along with the local Queen Charlotte Islands Observer, and the "back-east" Globe & Mail, I regularly check out Canada's equivalent of "Auntie Beeb", CBC. I feed my left-wing sympathies by reading The Tyee.

I don't find myself reading too many US media sites, although I do have a subscription to Salon, where, other than being a bit pretentious, my biggest complaint is that they don't have a high enough volume of fresh articles.

What I have been acquiring is a real addiction to British media, everything from the respectable to the point of ponderousness "Auntie Beeb" and The Times (yes, of London), as well as the Guardian, through to the much less serious Daily Mail, the totally light-weight and gossipy Hello! and the defiantly red-top Mirror. I am still studiously avoiding the cricket scores, although I have a weak spot for snooker.

What, you don't think I read 'em just for the sports news? 8-)

Finally, photos of Luna's now two-week old kits, the second and I very much hope last unplanned litter of kits for my household.

Yes, they are adorable... they are about the size of chipmunks right now, and bouncing around the cage when not asleep in a heap, causing Luna to retreat to the upper level. Once mobile, baby rabbits have no compunctions about impromtu nursing off their mother. Since female rabbits usually only nurse their babies once or twice a day and otherwise stay away from them, Luna's reaction to suddenly having a kit seeking an extra feeding is surprise, rapidly followed by fleeing out of reach. This doesn't seem to deter the babies one bit.

There are five kits, four in mixed shades of brown and gray, with dark brown ears, and one who appears white with grey and brown blotches. The white is a complete surprise, as mom Luna is a light grey all over, dad Sidestripe is shades of brown with some black striping, and Sidestripe's parents were solid black (Blacky) and shades of brown (Butterscotch) respectively.

Apparently, there are five genes that define rabbit fur colour, with an additional three or four genes that have something to do with how the coat looks. The information I could find on it got very technical and was mostly aimed at breeders. To add to my confusion, mini-rex rabbits come in a wide range of colours, and the official terms for them are not what I'd call self-evident... okay, "castor" seems to mean "brown", but "opal"? How 'bout "lynx"? Or "lilac"? A further complication is that kits change colour as they age. Butterscotch was lovely shades of cream through light brown when we first got him in May 2005. Now, he's matured to a darker brown, with almost grey shading on his belly and very dark brown ears, nose and with dark brown circles (like eyeliner) around his eyes. Oh well, I think it's safe to assume both Luna and Sidestripe carried white as a recessive.

Oh boy...

Actually, I can't tell how many are boys yet. Just that there are five little wiggly rabbit kits, looks like they'll be various shades of brown, grey and maybe even white.

Yes, a second surprise litter.

What happened was... when I first got rabbits in May 2005 ( Blacky and Butterscotch) and July 2005 (Luna, Whazzit and Chocolate), I couldn't get the girls fixed, the new vet didn't do lady buns. I did get the gents fixed once they were old enough. Of course, this was right around the time when we found out that instead of having four female mini-rex rabbits (Blacky, Butterscotch, Luna, Whazzit) and one male mini-rex rabbit (Chocolate), we actually had three males (Butterscotch, Whazzit, Chocolate) and two females (Blacky, Luna). Then Blacky had five kits on October 9, 2005, just 28 days after the probable father, her "sister" Butterscotch, was neutralized.

I never did find homes for the kits, so we went from having five house rabbits to having ten, which worked out pretty well. Of the new kits, four were girls (Shadow, Dusk, Liquorice and Brownnose) and only one was a boy (Sidestripe). Sidestripe was strictly segregated from his sisters, his mother, and Luna once he reached three months old, with plans to send him in to be neutralized once he got a bit bigger.

I finally got around to doing this when Sidestripe was nine months old, and the good news is that I found out that the vet - we're back to the old vet, since the new vet left so the old vet came out of semi-retirement - at any rate, the new old vet will do lady bunnies, so I can take the ladies in to be given the order of the spade. The bad news is that Luna had escaped her cage and had an unknown amount of time alone with Sidestripe one morning just two weeks before Sidestripe was taken in to be neutralized. We didn't actually catch them playing six-legged bunny, so I fervently hoped that maybe we'd caught Luna before Sidestripe had been anything less than a perfect gentleman.

Around this time... I'd long promised my son Robert that we'd get him a gray rabbit, and lo and behold, when we were in picking up Sidestripe after his trip to the vet, we saw that a lovely charcoal grey kit appeared at the feed store (adjacent to the vet's office), couldn't be more than 5-6 weeks old. When we went to collect him the next day, I noticed a larger (say 10 weeks old) fawn-coloured rabbit on her own in a cage in the back. "Almost getting too big to sell, people only seem to want to buy baby rabbits," the shop owner tells me. "Oh... what happens to the rabbits you can't sell?" I ask innocently. "We eat them," was the whispered reply, so as not to upset Robert who was busy cuddling his promptly named Stonepaw. I was just about ill on the spot.

Fawn and Stonepaw came home with us bringing the rabbit population to twelve.

And exactly a week ago today, Saturday July 22nd, around noon, Luna gave birth to five kits.

So, seventeen buns it is.

Well, the wait is on. It looks like Luna, our one-year old grey girl bunny is pregnant. If she is, she should have her kits within the next few days. This is because I know roughly when the only unfixed male bunny in the house escaped his pen and potentially assaulted Luna. Sidestripe managed this just about four weeks ago, and bunny gestation being about a month, we should have only a matter of days to wait.

Unless Luna's just gotten rather fat for no particular reason. And developed a tendency to run off with socks, mouthfuls of hay, and anything else more-or-less movable and pile it in a heap. Looking rather like a nest... false pregnancy, maybe?

I can hope, can't I?

Sidestripe has since had time to repent, as he was trucked off to the vet's and neutralized two weeks ago.

Next move is to get all the lady bunnies fixed, and as there are seven, it's going to take a while. This is partially because it's a fairly complex surgery to perform on a tiny five-pound rabbit and the vet is only willing to do so many at any one time, and partly because at $120 a bunny, I am having to budget for it. But I want to have it done within the next 6 months for two reasons: (1) no more surprise batches of kits, and (2) there's a staggeringly high (80%) incidence of uterine cancer in female rabbits 2 years of age and older. So fixing them means they'll have a longer life with us.

I've been seeing lots of deer while driving this month. Not very many fawns, but plenty of does and bucks. They mostly just stand on the side of the road, munching the grass on the verge, lifting their heads to gaze placidly at the cars zipping past. Every now and then one will dart across the road, but it's more common for the excitable ones to bound away from the road, across the ditch and into the woods.

The deer here are a dwarfed version of Sitka Blacktailed Deer, and were introduced to the Queen Charlotte Islands (aka Haida Gwaii) back in the 1930s. They are cheeky little buggers too, and smart enough to know that there's no hunting within village limits. Drove past two bucks calmly enjoying the view from a lawn at midday two days ago.

It's more common to see them at dawn and dusk. John has to leave for work at 6:30, so that means I'm up putting the kettle on for tea at 5:30 a.m. One morning last month I was blearily staring out of the kitchen window while filling the kettle at the sink, trying to see if the bunnies in the outside pen were stirring. As my eyes slowly focused and the sky lightened, I realized a doe was looking right at me, standing all of about 15 feet away in the back yard. I'd obviously interrupted breakfast. She slowly walked off to the gate, heading back across the road into the woods. I kept looking - it's a big kettle - and realized that there was a second visitor, a buck, further away in the back yard. I saw him because he moved, wandering past the outside pen and off out the other gate. (The bunnies came out after the visitors left.)

I took this picture last summer at midday, a brazen visitor to my front yard who ate some clover, checked out the fruit trees and then went back to his natural habitat.

We planted a tiny apple tree, gift from Mom & Dad last year. It was a spindly little thing, couldn't have been more than four feet tall. Once in the ground, it blossomed profusely and set 18 apples. The deer ate 17 of them. The one surviving Cannor Select was delicious.

Three sites to see:

Dave Barry - Even though Dave's taking a year off from writing and the columns are all re-runs, and the Miami Herald will send you the wierdest junk e-mail from time to time, it's still worth registering just to read 'em.

Cute Overload - Cute 'n' fuzzy to the max. Actually, I don't go there for the pictures, I just read the captions. (Chortle! Been waiting to use that line.) Note: diabetics or people easily overwhelmed by Hallmark Cards should avoid this site; everyone else, brush your teeth afterwards to minimize sugar damage.

Haggis Hunt - Okay, the haggis season doesn't open until November 30... but who can resist browsing the Haggisclopedia and staring at the ten Haggis Cams?

And have a nice day!

After a week of gloriously sunny hot weather, it clouded over Thursday. Friday morning I winced at the weather forecast - wind warnings for the Queen Charlotte Islands (aka Haida Gwaii) and a swirly mass of low pressure system heading straight for us promising lotsa rain to go with the wind. I was out of the house all day running errands and then visiting and the most common comment of the day was "yep, typical music festival weather".

The annual "Edge of the World" music festival has to be the islands event most plagued by rotten weather. I can remember one nice day in total in all the festivals I've attended, which means there were about 11 wet to outright stormy days. To maximize the bad weather experience, it's held on an exposed field right by the sea, so when the wind picks up, you can be pelted with blown spume as the wind-whipped waves crash into the rip-rap barrier on the other side of the highway.

Fortunately, it also seems to be the event which attracts the most resilient spectators, with people (usually including me) huddling under the giant tent to hear act after act perform from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon. They were down to a hardy core Friday evening when I dropped off a hitchhiker dressed in oilskins. The wind was gusting so fiercely it made driving more like sailing, as I was having to compensate for being blown sideways across the road. The rain was heavy enough to soak you through to your skin in minutes.

And Saturday the rain stopped and the sun came out. And has stayed out (apart from our brief midsummer night) right through to now, Sunday afternoon.

I didn't attend. It seemed disloyal somehow...

How to not buy an ebook.

First, do not listen to your 14-year old son's request for a copy of the "Skies of Arcadia: Legends" guide book printed by Prima Games in 2003.

Second, do not look it up on Amazon.ca and be staggered to find it offered for sale, used, by two profiteering Marketplace Sellers for $281.21 (Low Price!) or $900.18.

Third, do not look up the title and find out it is available as an e-book direct from the publisher, Prima Games, a subsidiary or affiliate or relative or something of Random House.

Fourth, do not pay $9.99 to download the ebook version from PrimaGames.com then spend 2 hours on dial-up downloading a 20mb file, twice, only to have it fail to get the unlock code to open its encrypted files, leaving you with only access to the 10 free pages which you cannot print.

Fifth, do not e-mail eGuidesupport@primagames.com, or if you do, do not be surprised when the e-mail bounces.

Sixth, do e-mail Random House at ecustomerservice@randomhouse.com and ask them what connection they have to Prima Games and why they aren't either removing the ebook or ensuring the unlock codes are still going out.

Follow-up: Random House had better luck contacting someone at Prima than I did. I received the unlock code July 14.

The phone rings. After I answer, a recorded message tells me that a telephone repairperson will be at my house Wednesday to install a 3-letter acronym and I have until 6 p.m. Tuesday to call (7-digit number) and arrange a different time. This is interesting because (1) it's already Wednesday, and (2) nobody has requested any 3-letter acronyms to be installed on our phones or elsewhere, at least as far as I know.

So I phone the seven-digit number and wind up speaking to a creepy interactive automated answering system, which is Telus's way of promoting the Turing test. I flunked; I took so long to reply it started to ask its question all over again. A few more unsatisfactory exchanges later I give up and ask to speak to a human. The machine offers to transfer me to a customer service person, but I have to tell it which type - financial? service? sales? ... fortunately 'I don't know' is an option, and only a few more queries later I get to listen to muzak while waiting to speak to a real live human.

The real live human asks me if I know I owe money on my phone bill, then tells me she can't find anything on my account. I explain that's right, I haven't requested anything and most particularly not the installation of a 3-letter acronym, but I got this call telling me it was happening and to stop it I had to call them yesterday. And by the way, do they have any cheaper phone plans?

Well, I can switch to a plan where I'm only charged 9-cents a minute instead of 14-cents a minute for long distance. Of course, I still have to pay a $4.95 plus taxes administration fee for the program, which equals 55-minutes, as opposed to 35-minutes on my old 14-cents a minute plan. As my Dad says, "never mind the quality, feel the width."

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the regular long distance rates, which range from 35-cents a minute to 75-cents a minute for calls I'm likely to make, depending on time of day, as long as I'm not calling either Afghanistan or Pitcairn Island where only person-to-person calling is available at a flat rate of $4.76 per minute (Afghanistan) or either $2.20 or $2.94 minute (Pitcairn Island). I assume the lower rate for Pitcairn Island - less than direct-dialing Poland - is because the operators aren't dodging live fire and the island is so small s/he can open the door and yell "Hey, Fred! Phone for you."

Assuming the straight long distance rates don't include an administration fee, if I use at least 20-minutes of long distance per month, or 4 hours per year, it does make sense to have a plan and pay an administrative fee, provided my calls aren't going to be mostly to Afghanistan or Pitcairn Island as the rates stay the same plan or no plan because you can't direct-dial.

Oh, and the threatened installation of acronym? Ignore it. It was probably just a wrong number.