Bunneh!

The "bunneh" ate my sweater. I just finished patching 6 small holes. I don't know when she could have done it, except maybe last year before I knew better.

She didn't actually chew it on purpose, but she loves to rearrange cloth. Her teeth are razor sharp and the puncturing is unintentional.

It is an old sweater from Land's End, before they were owned by JC Penny. It will still serve. After all, a wool sweater with a sweatshirt on top of it is very warm.

Christmas was busy, as usual. I did not blog, I didn't even try. You can only do so many things at once. It was cold rainy and Janow needed extra care. Something had to give. I look forward to catching up on everyone else's holiday as soon as I catch my breath.

Silver Anniversary

Silver has been here one year now. I have enjoyed her. Joseph wanted a rabbit really bad. I wouldn't have agreed to the rabbit if I hadn't wanted it too. So we went to Oakland Animal Services and selected a bun from many many unwanted buns.

When we got Silver home, she was one stressed rabbit! Joseph thought she would be cuddly and affectionate right away, even though he had said he understood that rabbits were not very cuddly and were pretty independent. So now she is my rabbit. Mostly. He enjoys her sometimes, now more that before. I gave her a year to get really settled after the shelter. That's how long it took Whiskers to really settle in to be the cat she is.

Rabbits are natural chewers and diggers, so life with a rabbit is pretty much a story of damage control. That is why she has her own towel pile and phone book under the chair. She has a plum branch by the TV and a rolled up towel stuffed behind the sofa. The towel did not prevent the customary burrow behind the sofa that most rabbits have. That is what all the newspapers are for. That's the picture, newspapers stuffed behind the sofa. They distract her and get in the way. Now she is dead set on newspaper removal. This is messy but harmless.

She's really great. Playful and opinionated. She spends most of her time in her cage by the chair where I sit to be on the computer. She pays very close attention to wherever I am. Sometimes, it I leave the room, she will come out looking for me. It's funny. She can hear the skin being peeled from a bannana across the room.

People have always asked me about horses in comparison to dogs. Now they ask me about rabbits in comparison to hamsters. The best comparison for horses and rabbits are rabbits and horses. They are more alike than different.

They are great pets for people with patience who can tolerate a bit of a mess.

Silver likes to be petted. She never seems to get enough. This is a pretty individual thing with rabbits. Some like it more than others.Rabbits groom each other. The dominant bun is usually on the receiving end.

As a 4 year old, Janow was not particular to being groomed. He tolerated it, but I like to do it, so he got used to it. Now he really enjoys it. Lately though, he wants to move our relationship on to new levels. I do not. I want to remain friends but keep it platonic. I need to get myself a squirt gun. Anybody else ever have this problem with their horse?


This is the trench with pipes in it. Dave and Joseph got all the exposed part done before it started to snow. Ew.

Today I was doing the last part of a saddle pad and I noticed a mistake. Up until this point, it has been very subtle, but......the pad is no good and there is nothing I can do. Ten+ ours of work and $40 in materials. Poof!

I wanted to get Joseph a bean bag chair for Chrstmas, but they were either too small or too expensive. I can sew one, so I priced the fabric. I think I have a line on peanuts to fill it, but with Craigs list, better to have them in hand before you make any real plans.

palm trees

Things have been accelerating to Christmas and I have been too busy to blog much.
Here is a picture of Dave on Mt Hamilton. The weekend after this was taken it got cold. Monday night saw snow.
No more shirt sleeve weather up there until spring!

I don't have to tell you who that guy in the bike is. He is smiling because he doesn't have to dig a trench and lay pipe.

There are a lot of artifacts that have been collected around trees. We don't know what they all are. Most of it we thing was from the garbage pile behind the one room school that used to be there.

My sewing injuries are healing up fine. I am not covered with band-aids like Les Nesman anymore. Sure is easier to type! I still have the fake thumbnail on, and one finger is still sore.

Suffering from insomnia, I have discovered watching TV shows on Netflix DVD. No commercials and you can start them any time you want. But....all my regular shows are either caught up and waiting for the current season to come out on DVD, or I have watched them to the end. So I am looking for new shows. I watched 6 whole episodes of Sex and the City, but didn't like it at all. I had 3 episodes of Stargate, but could not even make it through the pilot! I watched the first four Kyle XY episodes, and it was OK, but I can't see going out of my way to watch it. I would watch it if there was "nothing else on." I got the first DVD of Bones. I liked it, so did Joseph. Now it is on HIS Netflix cue. Hmmmm.
Where do I go from here?

This is a really bad picture of me that I took wearing earrings I bought fromKimsBeads on ETSY. They were only $4.00 + $1.50 shipping and they came in about three days!

Speaking of ETSY, which I don't like to do on my Blog, but I have marked many many things in my ETSY store to $5.00. Take a look, if you dare. The link is that big square one with the wolfy thing on it, over there on your right.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I expect everyone to keep doing whatever it is that you are doing and totally forget. Mama taught me that if I am realistic, I will not be disappointed.


"I'm not dead yet!"
-----Monty Python (and the Holy Grail)

Mt Hamilton

Silver blogged today!

LOL! That house isn't our main residence! Lucky us. We still live in a house in an Edward Scissorhandsian neighborhood in Milpitas. The trailer is up on Mt Hamilton, near James Lick Observatory where the body of James Lick is buried under the dome. Thirteen miles and 40 minutes or so out of San Jose, one hour from the city house. We are there on some weekends.

This is our house:(I had to remove this picture, it was too big! My sidebar was all messed up)
Janow lives at a boarding stable about 10 minutes away. Indian Hills Ranch. I'm taking my saddle pads there and some primitive sweatshirts tomorrow, hoping for a sale.
This is me, in front of our house.

The taller tree in the front is a magnolia tree, home to many hummingbirds. I have counted as many as seven within sight at one time. Despite their size and cuteness, they are very aggressive!

We are maybe less than 100 yards from I-680. If you think hard, you can make the traffic sound like a rushing river or a flash flood. The commute starts each morning before 5am. Dave installed dual pane windows and that helped a lot! "If the women can't find you handsome, at least they can find you handy." Dave said that in reference to The Red Green Show. I never said that. Ever.

I sewed a bit this morning, and did it wrong. This afternoon, I am ripping it out to do it again. It's 4 seams, totaling about 10 feet. When I die, my tombstone will say RIP and it won't stand for Rest In Peace.

At least it doesn't hurt. I have a band-aid on my left middle finger where the sewing machine needle went through the tip and shattered the nail. It hurt a like heck because there are lots of nerve endings there. It's hard to type with a stupid band-aid. It bled a lot, but slow.

My right middle finger has healed enough not to hurt. I was thread basting and decided to just put some duct tape on my fingertip instead of unpacking my thimble. That was a mistake. The eye end of the needle punched THROUGH the tape and slid into my finger, just under the nail, about a quarter inch. It didn't bleed at all, but left a red line that you can see through the nail. I only wore a band-aid for a couple of days to keep antibiotic ointment on it. Puncture wounds get infected easily.

That isn't nearly as gruesome as my sewing injury of the week before that! I punctured my right thumbnail with the needle of my industrial upholstery sewing machine. Blood came out of the hole! I thought it would become infected because I could not wash it well. It hurt so bad that night that I kept imagining that I would have to go to the doctor and have the nail removed. But it wasnt infected. The hole in the nail worked its way into a crack all the way to the end and then kept catching on everything. I was afraid I was afraid I would rip half the nail off by accident. I bought a set of fake nails and glued a plastic thumbnail on top of the crack. That seems to be working. Ugly though. You can see the bruise through the French manicure.

I should stick to horseback riding. It would be safer.

Well......?

This is it. The new well. Not very exciting, is it?


This is Dave, working the trenching machine. Pipes and electricity to pump the water have to go in a trench. This Ditch Witch was apparently designed for flat level surfaces. Also for operators bigger and heavier than Dave. Not to mention guys who weren't so conscious of renting it buy the hour.

It was really hard work and he relied on his crew(me) to bring water and ignorant suggestions regularly. Part of making your husband feel smart is making dumb suggestions. I'm really good at that. It helps to have a smart husband.


Here is us at the end of the day. The house is really a 40 year old mobile home. This makes us "Trailer Trash."

The walls are thin so you can hear what the neighbors are up to. In the absence of neighbors, they maintain the temp ambient to the temp outdoors. If we had neighbors, we could hear their teeth chatter at night.

We have a little TV there. No reception, but we hook up the XBox and we can play DVDs. So we sit across the room, looking at movies on a 10 inch screen, wishing for binoculars.

I hinted at Joseph that I needed new sweatpants for Christmas. I hinted pretty hard because he is new at being hinted at by women in his family. His response to me hoping to get new sweats by Christmas?

"With your own money."

Many Thanks to KK

Many thanks to KK for pointing out some errors in my poster. AFTER I had it printed and AFTER I had some of them laminated for outdoor posting, but BEFORE I put any up!!!! That BEFORE part is the most important!

In spite of finding that much of the time I spent was not to good use, and the money I spent on printing and laminating was wasted, She has saved me from a BIG mistake! The big mistake is the price. All the pads marked as $45 are actually forty five dollars. The pads marked as $400 or not, they are two hundred dollars. Still a lot, but my market research has shown this to be a very fair price.


To change it at this point, after the file has been sized and compressed and merged is tricky. The original layered draft has been erased. It was such a huge file that just changing the page view was taking a couple of minutes. Really. I am still learning.


Since my readers are so helpful, maybe one of you can tell me the origins of this glass. The people who owned this property before us found it and gathered it around this tree. These pieces are big. Bigger than my fist. I think they are pieces of the transformer things from old power poles. Dave says I am wrong.(Thats OK, he says that a lot! He's been arguing "corn is a vegetable" for years!) The power poles on the property are not nearly that old and were not erected to replace older ones. It sure is pretty with the light through it!

Gail, At The Farm, this ones for you!

How many people just happen to have a picture of their own outhouse in their hard drive?

it'll do

This took 7 hours. What a pain. I learned a lot and would do it differently if I were beginning again. I'm not. Next time will be better and faster. Tomorrow I will have it printed.

Misk

Silver is definitely building a burrow behind the sofa. Rabbits have such a reputation! She can't help it. She is following the program coded into her DNA.

I went to 7/11 and got a refill on my 44oz Big Gulp. I feel like Abby getting Caf-Pow. Then, of course, I have to play the paranoid white woman and count my change. I always count it, and I always feel like people are impatient thinking nasty things about me for holding things up. So I counted it and it wasn't right. So I counted it again, feeling really guilty, and it was wrong. It was $1.00 over. So I gave the dollar back, of course. And felt a lot less like an inconvenience.

We are renting a trencher this weekend to dig the trench to pipe the water into our storage tanks from the new well, and to lay the power lines to power the new well. I think we should build a windmill. This is the wrong time of year to suggest that. Dave still has not forgotten the year I said I wanted a palm tree.

I am reading Songs or Arbonne by Guy Gavrial Kay. I'm about half way through, and it's very good, and keeps getting better. I have a book by Steven King for after this one. Sometimes I get impatient.

Netflix sent the movie Sea of Love with Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin, and Ron Goodman. It was very good. The last one I wathced that I liked that much was A long Days Journey into Night, Katherine Hepburn, Jason Robards Jr, and Dean Stockwell. That was pretty incredible. That family was dysfunctional before they even invented the term Dysfunctional Family. If you even like old movies a little bit, I recommend it.

I am working on a flyer to put at the barn for my saddle pads. It is taking hours, of course! I'll show it here if you guys all want to see it.

New Grass, Old Bug

The first grass of the winter is coming up. Janow is looking forward to getting his, but horses who have had laminitis do not get a lot of green grass.

I got all my saddlepad photos edited and wrote the html for my webpage. That took a long time. At least 10 hours! Now the photos don't work!

----later that day------
They work. Here is the link Doublecatbatik website

Rats.

Now I can tackle the problem in my sidebar. The one that dissappeared. I have narrowed down the line where the error is. Now I have to figure out what is wrong and fix it. I don't know if that is the hard part or the easy part. I really don't want to know, but I will probably find out.

Here is the rig drilling our new well. They hit water at 220 feet. Lots of water. Many flushes of the toity are in our future. You can see how much dust they blew out! What a mess!