Domesticated animals, gratuitous machinery & a birthday

It's Theo's birthday & he loves cake.

He did also get roast beef, vegies & yorkshire pudding.

And due to his fascination with engines of all descriptions, he got a hot air engine.

On our recent Ballarat road trip, we saw & therefore couldn't pass by another old dredge/other giant machinery.

And everyone is interested in the new duckling. The chooks want to eat its food. Daisy runs around outside her cage at full speed pecking at everything, including the other animals, & makes the chooks freak out.

The dogs think she's a mouse and so can't be left alone with her. They also just try to sit on me all the time because they can never get enough attention.

And then there were three of them trying to sit on me, because we were dogsitting Hayley's dog, Roomie.

And the chooks enjoy the sunshine :). And dirt. (Note the lemons which I have not turned into lemonade. Um).

So I sit down. The cat sits down. The chooks peck me, the dogs sit on me, the duck pecks everything, the chooks run away, the rabbit watches on & the other cat hides in the shed. I'm surrounded by crazy animals & it makes me very happy ;)

Spring is in the air.....

Sunshine-happy cat

My warm seat in the sun!

Stick insect that must have come inside via bunny fodder :)

Bunny antics- trying to chew her way through a cardboard box barricade into my bedroom.

Random day out

Had a day in Melbourne today, even managed to catch up with a friend at the last minute, which was really nice as I hardly ever see her :)

Here is my day in nice, somewhat abbreviated point form.

1. Get up at 4 something a.m. At least I get to watch 'Police Rescue' re-runs while I eat breakfast.

2. Fall asleep on the train (pretty normal), woken periodically by a teenage girl with the loudest laugh in the world. I also smile and pull faces in my sleep.

3. Exchange today's return ticket for one with the right date (only bought it yesterday, opened my diary to look at appointment while buying ticket & still managed to buy for the wrong date).

4. Buy ticket for next week's trip (and will discover tomorrow that I have yet again bought it for the wrong date. How exactly do I do that?)

5. Decide it is too depressing, cold and drizzly outside and that I need to be in a big warm shopping centre with some cheesecake inside me.

6. Meet a duck wandering in the plaza outside the shopping centre. It just sort of wanders around unconcerned-ly, lets me get pretty close & then waddles away, softly quacking in rebuke when I try to catch it. I abandon my duck-rescue attempts & go to find the cake. (What exactly was I planning to do with the duck when I caught it, anyway? Put it in a locker and then take it home on the train with me? Give it to the information desk?)

7. Find a shop with the most delicious, pink cake holder in the world. Robert Gordon. I actually asked the shop lady if I could take a photo. Well, she said yes ;)

8. Make a trip to the petshop, which I usually find most enjoyable. Today I just got depressed because there were two rabbits and one rabbit looked depressed and ill, it even had weepy eyes and nose. I felt so sorry for it. It had a cold at the very least. Maybe I should ring somebody....

9. Go to my appointment, the reason behind all today's shenanigans.

10. Return to meet my friend. It's so dark at 3pm that the lights came on & you could hardly see. End-of-the-world cataclysmic event disaster-movie kind of clouds.

11. When my friend arrives, her car is smoking and smells weird. Before she leaves, we rather clutzily and girly-like add more oil and look at the water like we know what we're doing but her car starts again & does get her home.

12. I have another of my nostalgic/annoyed/old lady set in her ways kind of fits where I wonder why don't they just call it spencer street station like they used to and whatever happened to that weird upstairs bit with the special ceiling, whatever architectural term you would have used for it.

13. On the way home, some poor people are lost and get off at the wrong stop and board our bus by accident. After much confusion and consultation of maps, phone calls are made and they get off at my stop, where someone is picking them up. The person picking them up I imagine was saying something like this "What? Where are you? Spell it! Where's that? How far is it from ------? Well, where's that? Can you spell that??" I gave them my phone number in case they both got lost.

14. The bus, by the way, the driver told us that it was a dark old bus so she couldn't check our tickets & that the toilet door was stuck so if we needed to go, to just give her a yell & she'd jemmy it open for us. And we could always stop in (town) if we were desperate. Unrelatedly, someone's phone (which they obviously couldn't find in the dark confines of their bus seat) rang & it's ringtone was extremely loud and R-rated. I think it woke everyone up.

15. At my arrival home, I find in the back porch a different juvenile magpie calmly waiting in the cat-trap cage. Once released, it repeatedly tries to get in house, maybe it was confused and thought inside the house was daylight and the darkness was just a big blackness of nothing waiting to swallow it up. It eventually sat there on a box of hay & fluffed up it's feathers. It made one of those 'I'm hungry, feed me' bird-beak-motions so I took pity on it and fed it a cat kibble. When I left it, it was still sitting there, possibly waiting for daylight. (It was still there in the morning, but gone by the time the other birds outside woke up.)

16. In the pitch black, I also run around the yard calling for a disobedient cat, afraid that if I leave it it might try to eat the magpie. Not that she ordinarily chases birds. I just felt responsible for the poor confused bird. I make many trips outside while getting ready for bed, because that cat really doesn't want to come in. I tread on a slug and a big magpie poo in my bare feet & avoid a spider running past me on the footpath. Eventually the cat is inside, the magpie's sleeping on my porch & my rabbit is the one being disobedient, she doesn't want to go to bed. The night has been interesting enough, so even though the bins still haven't been put out, I decide to stuff the bins!! It's time to go to bed!!

Was Not a Happy Bunny

The Big Fluff Queen, Juniper, went to the vet today to get her claws clipped. The vet even called them daggers, so no wonder she has been stabbing me when she sits on my feet lately. I might be brave enough to do it myself next time, I've just never done it before.

She handled it pretty well, until I had to get her out of her cage at home (she hasn't got a better cage yet, only my old one that you have to pick them up through the hole in the top).

When I put her on the floor, she not only GROWLED at me, twice!! but then proceeded to stamp her feet at me a number of times before hiding behind the couch. She has never growled at anything in her life. She didn't even get so upset when I had to take her to get her stitches out - and that was actually more painful!

Lucky she's pretty easy going (or forgetful, I'm not sure which ;)). She is happily teeth grinding when I pat her now, following me around, in a generally good mood for a rabbit on a warm afternoon. And no more stabbing mummy.

I know there's treats here somewhere.../ What's all the fuss and bother about?/ Teeth grinding happy bunny

Benny, the World's Biggest Rabbit

House Rabbit News - Pet Bunnies Blog � Benny the Flemish Giant Rabbit Vying for World Record

This rabbit is so big, he's almost scary. Wouldn't you like to snuggle up to him, tho? :)

Furry Butt Fursday

I was a little late for Thursday (Friday here), but this post is following this blog in paying tribute to a little furry butt, Hans. So here are my furry bunny butt shots, of one uncooperative rabbit.

And a furry butt in flight

sleeping again

I know I could be in danger of creating a rabbit-blog (not a real dangerous thing, though), but I love watching my rabbit sleep. Something so peaceful and innocent about a sleeping rabbit. Even though she seemed to be having a very active dream while sleeping the other day. Here are some attitudes of rabbit-repose.

And that last one is a terrible photo, but it was very cute at the time. I think that was when she was dreaming. Involving lots of eating sounds, leg twitching and ear-wiggling.

Oh so clever rabbit

This is her latest trick. These socks had been hung on the two nearby clotheshorses at least three times. Every time I put a sock back, she'd take more and more neighbouring socks off , and the intervals between her sock-removing were decreasing. As they'd say on CSI, her behaviour was escalating. And it seems the wetter the sock, the better. As you may see, she doesn't just remove them, either (which is done with both teeth and by claw-scratching), but she then flings and bunches them all over the floor. Her latest (escalated) episode had them moved all the way out into the hallway. Rabbit fun. I now have to hang socks out after she's gone to bed, so they have SOME chance of drying....

We could do duets....

Small Animal Fun - Trick Training

Bunny... Behave! Rabbit Behaviour & Correction Specialist - Tame & Train your Bunny! at Pets Classifieds

Bunny... Behave! Rabbit Behaviour & Correction Specialist - Tame & Train your Bunny! at Pets Classifieds

I saw this ad & my faith in humanity was restored. (But still, too much attention is paid to dogs, really).
Perhaps they could have helped with this earlier problem:


Although I would put up with twice as much mess because she is just so CUTE! And they are in the UK after all.... (maybe there's too many farmers remembering rabbit plagues for it to ever catch on here....).

i can't help but love my rabbit (or The Proud Rabbit Mother Who Never Shuts Up)

Yes, I do love my rabbit & go on and on about her latest adventures.

This is what the crazy, possibly hormonal adolescent rabbit did one day while home alone. Not sure what else it was about. I'd just cleaned her litter and food tray, so she wasn't cranky about that, just messed it all up.

She bunched up her food-tray paper and shredded it all over the carpet. She moved her food tray and litter tray all around. She even up-ended her water bowl (bottom right of photo) and threw it across the floor.

A very sneaky & suspicious looking rabbit....

And no it isn't gorillas in the mist, it's rabbit in the curtain...

On this particular day, she buried herself in and was rummaging around in the curtain on the front door. I was trying to leave for work but couldn't find her in all the layers of curtain. My inability to get her out probably wasn't helped by my inability to stop laughing at the ridiculous strange behaviour that was going on in the curtain.


And here's just one fat bunny, communing with the dust bunnies.

Bathrobe Adventures

Amongst other things, I have an almost daily habit of running around outside in my bathrobe in the early morning, or sometimes not so early. And sometimes it’s after dinner as well, which is also broad daylight during daylight savings.

Picking grass, hunching over and creeping around my mostly dead- weed lawn, poring over it even, searching for prime bunches or even individual pieces of grass and a stray stalk of dandelion or milk-thistle, going in and out my back door with handfuls of grass. Sometimes armfuls. In my dressing gown. Carrying and taking inside what are obviously bunches of grass or weeds.

At least I try to avoid the front yard. Although it sort of is the front yard, as the side of the house is angled towards the street and doesn’t have a separate fence. If I hear people or a car, I just make sure I’m facing the other way and pretend to be perfectly normally absorbed with my bunches of grass, hunched over the ground. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be near the hot water heater, so I can just sort of well, hide behind it, in a purposeful kind of way.

So I’m not ashamed of my behaviour, I just don’t like to advertise it. I realise that it could be construed as kind of odd.

I am very fond of my rabbit, and it is spoilt. If you are one of my neighbours, I’m not hoarding that grass in my fridge. I do buy groceries.

Juniper

Juniper, beloved offspring of Eva and Nemo, is the house-trained star of my household.

When she first came home. Don't know what she was doing there, or how he/she got in there in the first place either.

Eating, eating, forever eating

Always checking something out, especially if it involves me

Lying in the doorway, until she got very annoyed at the camera going off and hopped away again.

So, like any proud parent, I take much interest in her daily activities. Unfortunately, I am not sure if she is even a she. I have suspicions that she is a he. Doesn't matter much as Juniper will be going to the vet to have an operation as soon as he/she is old enough (shhhh).

If I feel inclined, I will include her litter tray in the next photo shoot. How exciting ;)