Domestic Geek

Wow, it is hard to post and keep up with everything else that's going on!

Here's how I got my previous bunny:

When I was going to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, my girlfriend and I lived in the basement of a house and her brother lived upstairs with 5 of his friends. The Denver Broncos were in the Superbowl, so there was a major party happening upstairs. Two of those guys owned snakes...one of the snakes was a boa constrictor that was 7 or 8 feet long. They had purchases some rabbits for snake food, however, the rabbits were too big. The large snake was just playing with them, sqeezing them, etc. They had the last surviving rabbit in a smaller snake pen on the back porch. He'd been pretty messed up and was sitting in a puddle of his own excrement and urine. I asked what they were going to do with the poor guy and the jerk says that he's going into the superbowl chili. Over my dead body!

I rescued him, took him downstairs and gave him a bath, wrapped him in some towels. The poor thing was scared to death! I was a big metal head (it was the '80s) and I named him Stryper. He had white and gray bands. I'd post a pic, but all of my old pet picures are in storage, I think. Anyway, the squeezing did brain damage and he had bouts of epileptic seizures from time to time. Other than that, he was the most sweetest bunny I ever had. I had him for many, many years. I had to have him put to sleep when a particularly bad seizure broke his back. My mom drove me to the vet and I cried and cried. In fact, I'm getting a little teary now. *sniff*

I got a frantic call from Marcus one night about three weeks after we took Trinity in—she was having babies! She gave birth to five, but one was stillborn. They were so tiny and they kept escaping through the bars of the cage. Marcus was constantly rounding them up and putting them back. I remember going back to check on them and kicking one that was on the floor really far away from the cage. We also started panicking when Trinity wouldn't feed them. In fact, she didn't seem to want to have anything to do with them at all. Marcus scoured the Internet trying to figure out what we could do so they wouldn't die. We got tiny baby bottles and canned goat's milk and just as we sat down to feed them, she gave in and did it herself. Yay!!!!!

I know we've got pictures of them smaller than this one, but of course I can't find them. I think they were a little over two weeks old here.



There ended up being one boy and three girls. He named the boy Neo (Matrix again), but being a shortage of female characters in the first movie, he named the remaining ones after Healther Locklear, Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera. As soon as it was medically possible, we got Neo neutered so that we wouldn't have any more baby bunnies to deal with.

We think that poor Trin was knocked up by a wild jackrabbit while she was out in the wild (Neo looks just like one). We don't know if she got away or was dumped by her owner, but nobody ever posted any signs about missing a rabbit.

Here's some individual pictures of them on a lame page I made in my first html class.

In late July 2000, Marcus and I were living out of the Eastern Plains of Colorado in a small town called Byers. Marcus had to leave for work before I did (it was in the middle of the night, actually) and he comes back in to tell me there is a rabbit under my car. Um, we lived by a huge field full of rabbits, so what was so special about this? It was a domesticated rabbit. I spent an hour out there trying to catch it, but to no avail. I needed sleep, so I told her, "Fine, you don't want me to help you, let the coyotes eat you." (I didn't really mean it, I was tired.)

When I left to go to work, no sign of the rabbit anywhere. I felt a twang of guilt, but what could I do? When I got home, I stopped in my garden to grab a zucchini for dinner. There was a horrible thunderstorm underway--lots of loud thunder. I pulled back a leaf to pull a zuch and there is the bunny, cowering in fear of the storm in my garden!

I scooped her up and took her in the house. Marcus and I let her stay in the bathroom and I told him I'd find her a home as soon as I could. I promised him I wouldn't get another rabbit after I had to have my previous one put to sleep. He got attached, though, so we got her a cage. She's the 2nd one from the right in the picture above. Marcus' favorite movie at the time was The Matrix, so he named her Trinity.

to be continued...

I came upon Glim.org Group Blog this afternoon. They are blogging on behalf of The Great Bunny Rescue. I was immediately intrigued because I have five bunnies myself (I'll write about how that happened in the next entry). Best Friends Network rescued a thousand bunnies that had become feral in a Reno, NV backyard. Many of the females are pregnant because, y'know, they breed like rabbits! I hate people that get pets of any kind and don't treat them responsibly.

Just a random observation while surfing though many, many blogs this afternoon: A lot of pages hurt my eyes or my design sensibilities and I couldn't return.

Type too small, clashing colors, too darned hard to find the first post. Take OpenDiary blogs, for instance. When I go to the main page, I don't want to have to hit yet another link to get to the most recent post. It reminds me of flash intros. If I have to sit through one, I probably won't come back.

Even as a designer by trade, I know my design is kind of lame. I've been a little burnt out and working on my own code when I got home is one of the last things I've felt like doing. I am going to try and have a new design in place at the end of this blogathon. We'll see.