Noe has been having some fun out on the patio, making herself a little fort.
Really, she’s just figured out how to get inside a folded-up sheet we had draped over the arm of a chair to give her some privacy. But it is pretty cute.
As I’ve mentioned in my 2011 Year of the Rabbit post, rabbits are one of the rare animals who are both heavily associated with certain cultural practices and small enough to keep as a pet. While rabbits can-and do!-make great pets, they can also be ornery, destructive, expensive, and take up a lot of your time.
I’ve blogged quite a bit about Noe and her behavior and the interesting things she does. I also plan to put together a post in the near future on how much money we’ve spent on Noe in the over 10 years we’ve had her- I believe it will be…instructional for those who don’t realize just how much having a pet rabbit costs.
Easter is a particularly bad time of the year for rabbits who are purchased as impulse buys for small children, and who eventually perish from neglect or are abandoned because people realize that they won’t just sit in a basket twitching their noses all day. You should always have a realistic idea of what it will take to keep a pet before buying one. The House Rabbit Society is a good place to go for info on bunny behavior and Easter and all things lapine.
One of my recent projects has been to make a rag rug out of some old t-shirts. I used these instructions, though my rug didn’t come out nearly as nice as the one pictured. Aside from practice, I suspect that it would take cutting the rags into evenly-sized strips and more planning in terms of color pattern to get a finished product that’s actually pretty.
But it’s my first attempt at making a rug, and it’s functional, so I’m satisfied with it.
Noe likes it too:
Unfortunately, she seems to like it too much– when I placed it in its permanent location, she hopped up to it and started to nibble! This is a big problem, first because eating fabric is bad for her, and second because now we can’t actually use the rug because there is nowhere in the apartment that Noe does not go.
I fear that our only course will be to give the rug away, but unfortunately its aesthetic limitations will make that a problem…
Noe has been expressing her personal empowerment lately by eating feminist magazines.
I missed bunnyblogging last week, but Noe is still up to her usual tricks.
This week, she decided to start one morning by eating a book of piano music that has been hanging out on our keyboard for four years without her paying any attention to it. It’s telling that even half-asleep I can differentiate the usual sound of her chewing on cardboard (we keep boxes around to indulge her in this) from ripping into “G# exercise Number One.”
I feel justified in bothering her by taking photos while she’s eating after this latest incident. I guess it shows that no matter what routine a rabbit gets into, she will one day get bored and find any chewable products you assumed were safe.
Noe does not like sonic booms. If she saw an approaching meteor, she would try to shoot it down with her laser-beam eyes.
…especially if she thought it wanted to take her lettuce.
It’s always interesting to watch Noe eat her hay. When she likes the batch we’ve bought her, she gets really into it.
Notice the paws delicately resting on the little hay stack? She pulled that out of her basket so she could climb all over it. She ignores the hay that’s underfoot until we fluff it up for her.
And of course she often assumes that what’s inside the basket is better than what’s already been pulled out. Maybe the smell of the good stuff is magnified inside.
Noe is fond of taking adorable naps in the midst of her messiness:
In this case, she’s acting quite cute while surrounded by rejected hay.
When I first got Noe, I had this idea that she would be a cute addition to the house: she could roam the apartment and would keep her food nicely localized in one are and her waste in another. It would be like having a cuter, vegetarian cat that enjoyed sleeping in a cage.
Well, that idea didn’t work out long.
My first clue should have been the pulling the hay out of the nice little bowls and scattering it over various surfaces. The entropy just increased from there.
At least she’s consistent about the litter box usage. Well, mostly consistent…
Today, I did some gardening: pulled out some mint (which had sneaked its evil tendrils under nearly a third of one of the patches), did some planting of seeds, and transplanted a few things.
You’ll note that there’s still a bunch of mint in the plot; I didn’t want to get rid of all of it. But I did clear it out of the old misome bed, which is now planted with pak choy, radishes, and some nasturtiums. I’m hoping that the nasturtiums will do well enough in shade that we can put them under/in between the collards eventually. But I don’t know what nasturtium seedlings look like, so I thought it would be better to start them out in the open so as to avoid weeding them by mistake.
I transplanted a batch of chives that I’d had growing on the porch into various spots in the garden. They were getting pretty rootbound in their pot. We’ll see how they do, given freedom to spread out. I also took a few baby fennel bulbs from a giant plant in the communal area, separated them, and planted them in our plot. I’m leaving some blank space for now, which the radicchio, beets, and lettuce will end up in after they sprout at home. But I did seed some arugula into the old pak choi territory.
The communal plot next to ours has a lot of really big carrots, so I harvested some of those today. Carrots will only grow straight when they’re in soil that’s completely free of rocks and other obstructions, which this soil clearly is not. As a result, some of them are pretty freaky looking. Noe was of course very interested in them:
The next two photos are pretty blurry, but I think this helps capture the drama of the epic carrot monster confrontation:
I did let her nom on it for a bit before taking it away. I have no doubt she’d try to eat the whole thing, which would be really, really bad…
