Happy First Friday! If you're in Honokaa, there's music and food booths along main (Mamane) street. I was working at the shop, so missed wandering up and down the road, but the folks all wander in and out of the shop so it's sorta the same thing.
The railing for the back deck of the rental house is now mostly finished. Whew! Dropping a major project into the usual work load without a lot of lead time makes for a huge time crunch. But, it's looking like that project will be getting finished up in a week or two so we can get back to our usual level of projects.
Here's some pictures of the finished railing. We still need to paint the floor and do some work on the picture window in the living room, but the deck railing at least is finished.
As you can see, we still need to paint the floor, but the railing itself is more or less finished. It took several weeks since we're very slow carpenters, but it seems to have turned out okay. It's sturdy and has a nice wide top rail which is good for setting drinks and plates on.
This is the narrow end of the deck. There used to be some temporary stairs there, but that made the narrow end into more of a walkway than a place to sit, so the steps were replaced with some solid railing. If it turns out steps there were better, we can always build in steps later. I think this area will be great for a barbeque grill. It's on the downwind side of the deck and past the French doors, so all the lovely barbeque aromas can go over and cause the neighbors to drool instead of making the interior of the house all barbeque scented. Not that barbeque scent is that bad, but we don't want folks to be hungry all the time from smelling barbeque.
The idea for the design of these stairs are stairs that sort of 'float' up to the deck, no real visible means of support. They are also pretty shallow and wide, they could have been built with one less step, but they are a much easier walk than some stairs. When the steps were designed, it was going to be a house we were going to live in for years and years so it seemed a good idea to make steps that would be friendly to older feet. Sigh! I miss that back deck!
Well, hopefully now we can get back to bunny business and see about finishing the hare cuts for everybunny around here. Although, there's rumors of a bunny show sometime maybe in the next several months. If everybunny gets a haircut, they won't be show ready for at least several months afterwards.
We did get the fluff from a few bunners harvested. Janet feels a much cooler bunny these days, although her groomer isn't exactly very much of a stylist. Fortunately, most bunnies don't care to be stylish, they're just glad to not have as much fluff on them anymore.
Janet did get more plucking than shearing this time around. Her coat had the next layer partially grown in so if it had been cut, there would have been short hairs in with the rest of the harvest. Short fiber can make what's called 'neps' in the finished yarn. We wouldn't want any neps! So Janet was plucked instead of sheared. Plus she plucks easily so it was almost easier to pluck than to shear.
We had the help of one of our prime Rabbit Wranglers for the latest roung of harvesting bunny fluff. He has decided to start a Bunny Empire. Well, maybe a small bunny farm? So, anyway, as the beginnings of this new Empire, one of the young black bucks, Zephyr, has gone off to live up mountain to be the beginnings of the new bunny establishment - of whatever size it ends up. We can use all the bunny fluff we can get! The more folks raising bunnies the better, I think. I'm sure Zephyr thinks so, too. Once Zephyr is settled in, then some more bunnies will go up to help with the bunny enterprise, it's hard to start a bunny herd with only one buck. But, at least it's a start.
To commemorate the beginnings of the newest bunny empire on our island - we give you this image. Later on, after the newest Rabbit Venture is going well, we can use this picture as either a starting point or blackmail - or maybe both. Ha!
Of course the best way to take photos of Rabbit Wranglers is after they've spent the whole day doing farmwork. Too bad it was at a different farm and not our backyard bunny 'micro-farm'. If he had been working on our 'farm' he'd look a lot less like he'd 'been rode hard and put away wet' as the cowboys say. I think he comes over to play, er, do tough farmwork wrangling fluffy bunnies since it's a lot less work than 'real' farmwork. :)
It's so hard to get good rabbit wranglers these days - on the way to the bunny hutches, the wretch nibbled down half the purple kale in the garden (we only have one purple kale plant). So be sure to notice the kale stuck to his teeth. Ha! (insert snickers here). What isn't in the picture is his pocket full of purple kale. No wonder Zephyr is looking interested in his new person. Although Zephy had gotten groomed a bit earlier along with a bit of kale bribery so perhaps he has kale stuck to his teeth too? Boys and Kale, maybe it's a new trend?
Hopefully in a year or so there will be lots of bunnies (and more kale) over on our Rabbit Wrangler's farm. He doesn't have a name for his Bunny Empire yet, but this is just the beginnings so a nifty name isn't necessary yet.