The rabbit problem

C. is off somewhere, so I'm finishing the last of the apple pie. Heh heh.

She's planning to crawl under the building today and turn the outside water off. And hike down to the pump house and turn the heater on. Then I suppose we should gather up hoses and garden stuff and put it all away for the season.

I've been on rabbit-colony duty for some months now. C. does a better job of cleaning it, but she's got plenty of other things to do. (I don't mention that they are her rabbits – and you talked her into getting them, Emma Rose!) Not that I'm bitter. I'm really not. I like the rabbits.

Being hippie idealists, we've worked to keep them in a utopian colony, despite bunny squabbles. You know – everyone getting along, sharing common spaces, frolicking together. We had a great bunny colony years ago. But this one has not been successful. Monty Python was right about rabbits – they can be vicious little bastards. I'm serious.

We started out with a colony of six: Smokey and Crystal, and their four offspring, Rue, Marty, Fondu and Plum Bob. They have known each other all their lives; the four males are neutered. The basis for a stable, happy community, right?

Over time, Bob got aggressive and had to be moved to a cage. Marty, the pushy little runt, has had his face ripped up twice. Rue and Crystal (the girls) have gone after each other. Fondu the Magician is pretty mellow, but will not put up with being hassled. Rue hassled him, got her face all cut up, and now Rue is in a cage. Crystal seems to get along with Fondu, so they have the run of the colony (the old boys' bathroom) and Smokey, who is a sweet-natured housebroken guy who gets along with everybody, is installed in our bathroom. Marty is in there now, too, though he is not housebroken.

So, basically, a maximum of two of our rabbits can be housed together. The utopian colony is a bust.

Since I have to separate them, I'm working on building some "rabbit condos," which are large cages with multiple levels that encourage jumping, climbing and play.

Lola's bunny condo, from www.binkybunny.com

The plan is to build a condo for everybody (in pairs, if possible) and let them take turns running loose in the room, and in the bunny yard in summer. Rabbits are trendy house pets these days, and there are a bunch of groups promoting humane housing and treatment for them. You can find lots of info online abut house rabbits – but watch out for meat-rabbit sites. Our bunnies are fiber animals first and pets second, but not dinner. We don't need to see graphic photos of rabbit "processing," thank you very much.

So, yeah, working on the rabbit problem. In the usual slo-mo. With pie.

Pie and chocolate

 We don't celebrate Thanksgiving. We like our holidays less touched by genocide.

But K. and S. came up to visit, with our charming new grandbaby. She's a month old, about the size of a loaf of bread, and very snuggly. Here she is, sleeping on her papa.

We had homemade (from our giant Jarradale squash) pumpkin pie and chocolate bars. It was good.

Keet feet, and more rain

That's how they sleep, all flopped over like rubber chickens. And there is the second most recent innovation, a stick for a perch, so they can practice roosting like the big birds. Sometimes they actually use it.

Today I put a brick in there, so they could climb up closer to the heat lamp. Teeny was looking a little cold, and she has trouble gripping the perch with her tiny feet. The brick would hold the heat, and is just about exactly Teeny-sized.

They all went apeshit. The big scary brick was in one corner, and they huddled in another, making pathetic cricket cries of distress and trying to climb up each other to safety. Their mother warned them about big scary bricks. Wait – their mother never warned them about anything, just left them to freeze to death on their first day out of the eggs. Sheesh. I guess they are a little nervous. The freaking goes on for an hour. So I cover the brick with loose straw. OMG! Big scary brick! Big scary straw! 

I offered them hard-boiled egg, all mashed and yellow and delicious, in the dish in another corner. They all climbed on top of the egg in the food dish and hid from the brick. 

Now I know I should let them settle down (if they ever will), but this is going to be so great, right? In goes a second brick, in another corner under the water bottle. OMG! They are flapping  and flailing like crazy birds. I was hoping the increased height would keep them from pooping in the water dish. But now the water bottle is tippy. So out with the old, in with a new water bottle. OMG! They are down to one safe corner. Every other place is fraught with peril.

I give up. Finally.

In other news, it's still raining. C. made apple pie yesterday.

Lazy Saturday

I wake every few hours all night long (I guess that's common with MS), so I'm not up until 10 or later. No ball of fire, me. On top of that, today feels like a lazy day. C. doesn't recognize those, so she was out digging sunchokes, hauling wood in, cleaning the chimney topper.... 

I'm in my chair, glasses off, jammies on, outlook puckered. Meh. Wonder what's for supper.

I did booble out and feed the chickens. 

The goats appeared as Earl and I were hauling the bucket of chicken food from the car. They were all fresh and curly from the rain – it's back to monsoon season now, with snow just around the corner. They pushed their way to the bucket. Since I'd made sure to clip the lid on tightly, we weren't worried. Put the bucket down, opened the gate, and Earl herded them right in. Good boy.

One egg today – one of the hairdos, Dovey's pullets, is laying lovely little blue eggs. Nobody else is contributing, so we've been buying eggs from our milk lady.

A younger hairdo, from summertime.

The hairdos, with their helmet hair.

The wood pile grows

The daughters were up the other day. S. brought bags of duck bedding for garden mulch and composting, and helped C. on the roof.

Em and Richard got two loads of wood while we watched Liam. Bella the weiner granddog came along to guard the wood stove and beg for spaghetti.

C. and Liam discussed something at length. Walter stood guard. I stuffed the handsome boy full of food and did diaper duty.

Bella is pretty funny. Her former person (Richard's mom) taught her to sit up and beg, which she does with gusto, pawing the air and mooing. 

C. cooked up some really tasty spaghetti sauce with our canned tomatoes and frozen pesto, and Em brought unmeatballs. Delicious.

Mushroom business

We went mushrooming again today, and found some beauties.

And I found a great website for identifying boletes (mushrooms with spongy pores instead of gills). You pop in your region, cap color, stem color and a few more variables, and it pulls up your possibilities. Then you cross-check with other sites and photos, and cook up and sample a tablespoonful (just in case you have some sort of sensitivity to a particular shroom).

This according to hikersnotebook.net:

 No boletes are known to be deadly; however a few that can make you very sick. In Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard, Nicholas Money opines that Boletus satanus, understandably known as Satan’s Bolete, “can make people shit themselves senseless.” Caution in bolete ingestion is thus in order.

These are suillus caerulenscens, or the blue-staining suillus. It's an orangey-brown boletus with yellow pores that turn brown with age or bruising. Slice it in half and you'll see yellow flesh in cap and stem, and a blue stain at the base of the stem that quickly fades to pinkish. Edibility: good.

C is cleaning them for the drier – these may be more trouble that they are worth, she says. The slimy coat on the caps needs to be removed, as well as the pores on older specimens. Our boletes measure about 3 inches across the cap, and that's a lot of fussing with a small fragile mushroom. We'll see what's left of them.

Now if they were king boletes (boletus edulis), I could see it. Those puppies can be 14 inches across and weigh 6 pounds.

The king

OK, it's my turn to wash mushrooms.

Ides of Nov

Almost.

Rainy Monday. I woke early to a new tap... tap... tap noise. I've learned to never ignore that sound. We have a brand new leak in the hall. Positioned a couple of buckets and went back to sleep.

Now C. is up on the rooftop with a bucket of black roof goo. It's probably a tiny hole where a nail has worked its way loose up through three layers of tarpaper.

I've been on mushroom-washing duty. I'm on the third grocery bag of the big white funnels, the really dirty ones. I wash 'em, C. slices them, we rotate them through the driers and into jars.

Earl and I were out decanting chicken food from a sack in the car into a bucket this morning. (I keep the 40-pound sacks in the car, or in the hallway in a lidded garbage can – the better to repel goats, mice and Earl.) Filled the bucket, closed the car hatch, boobled toward the chicken house. And then we saw the goats. They had escaped their pasture and were loitering near the chicken yard. "Shit," I believe I said. Earl wagged in agreement. 

The bucket had no lid. The goats weigh about 80 pounds each. I tend to fall over. We continued on. 

I brandished my cane, a heavy black one, in a preemptive way, and made rude eye contact. "Move, you bastards," I believe I said. They came ahead; I tried to ward them off with the cane; they came on over and under the cane simultaneously and planted their big horned heads in the bucket and pushed; I hit the ground just after the bucket. Bastards. I haul myself back up. My robot jammie pants (yes, I am retired) are all muddy at the knees. My hands are covered in mud and chicken shit. The horned bastards are hoovering layer crumbles from the ground. I briefly consider gimping into the house and asking C. to help me put these damn goats back in the pasture, just like a big baby. 

Hell, no. I grab the bucket and again make for the chicken house. The goats leave the pile of grain on the ground and go for the bucket, shoving their heads inside. I reef on someone's horns, spin around and go down again. More mud on the robo-jams. I climb back up. This time I fetch the big goat a smart rap on his nose with the cane. He seems surprised, and backs away. Little goat brother makes an end run around Earl and the cane and goes back to chowing on chicken grain. I fetch him a smack on the nose, too. I call Earl over and we push the goats back toward the pasture gate. I get the gate open, and we get one in, but the other escapes. We start over. Noses are smacked. One is in, the other hesitates... "Get 'em, Earl!" I cry, and he does. Gate closed.

Chicken breakfast was served in a big pile on the patio.