January 17th, 2020

No More Lanai!

and organizing bunnies, too

baby bunnies visiting auntie bunny next door

Baby Bunnies off visiting

Auntie Buttercup got grasses before they did so they went visiting

The two young REWs are under the grasses there somewhere. Sometimes the bunnies organize themselves. The two little white ones who still don't have official names yet, hmm, how about "Jasmine" and "Iris"? Ratz on "Jasmine", there was one of those in 2012 and she had offspring so I can't reuse the name. There's never been a "Camellia" before and although there was an Iris back in 2012, that was a doe and not a buck, so I suppose we can call the little guy 'Iris'? Maybe officially 'Iris II'? Hmm, or perhaps 'Jonquil'? That would then be 'Jon' for an everyday name? I could remember Iris better, though. Okay, so I guess they can be Camellia and Iris. So now they have names, woot! I'll have to go update the database. Anyway, back to the picture, when Buttercup got grasses before the now named Cammie & Iris, they squeezed through the wall between the two hutch spaces and started munching on Auntie Buttercup's grasses. Pretty soon they will be too big to do that, but for now, they can nibble on either their own food or the food next door.

It's easy to name bunnies when the annual name theme is known and several names are already thought out in advance. However, Camellia (female) and Iris (male) are the last two 2019 Flower Name Theme babies so now we will need another name theme for 2020.

Our previous name themes have been:

Just because we have a name theme doesn't mean ALL the babies from that year get the theme names. When baby bunnies go to other families, then they can pick their own names. That's how we had a flower named bunny in 2012 when the previous Iris was named. They keep the "Hillside" on the front of their name, though, since they're pedigreed and Hillside Farm is the name of our rabbitry. At the time, I figured not many folks would be farming on a hillside so figured it may be a somewhat uncommon name, but nope - there's way more than one 'Hillside Farm' which is why the website is 'Hillside Farm Hawaii'.

Anyway, back to the names, having a name theme makes it easier to keep track of bunny ages. Any "Atmospheric" bunnies (2016) are getting a little old for breeding if they're a doe, but still good to go if they're a buck. Gayle, Myste and Phineus Phogge are all "Atmospheric" bunnies so they're three years old this year. This will probably be the last year for Myste & Gayle to have any offspring, but as a buck, Phin will be good for a few more years.

Although now it's getting to where I almost need a list to keep track of the annual name themes. I should have wimped out and decided to start the name theme years with alpabetic names. All bunnies in the first year, their names start with "A", then the next year they start with "B", etc. Seems kinda boring but it'd be really easy to keep track of them.

To help keep track of who every bunny is, other than the name theme each year, the bunnies do have ear numbers and some of them get the numbers tattooed in their ears. If they're a buck, they don't generally get a tattoo because I can tell them apart. But a black doe or a white doe can be pretty hard to absolutely tell apart from her matching friends and sisters so they will frequently get an ear tattoo. The ear numbers start out with the year and then go sequentially from there. Last year we got up to 926. This year we can either start them with 0 or 20, not sure which. 001, 002, 003, we'd get a 007 this year if we did that number system. Maybe we should have a spy name theme this year? Hmm, how many names of spies do we know?

Hmm, maybe storm names this year? We've had some record rainfall already. Or perhaps climate change names? Wildfire, Flood Tide, Erosion, Habitat Loss, hmm, those aren't really cheerful names, are they? Stormy names or weather names might be better, although that's somewhat similar to the Atmospheric Conditions names. Or perhaps, we scroll back to the beginning name theme and go through them again? Then I'd only have to remember ten name themes, but it would still be a bit difficult to keep them in order. Well, it's still early in the year before deciding on a name theme.

The bunnies here are not only pedigreed, (which means we have to absolutely identify who is who and keep track of who meets up with whom) but they also are part of a pretty small gene pool. We keep pretty close track of how close each bunny is related to everyone else. I'll probably map that out sometime and make a separate page for it.

Bunny Dates
possible upcoming babies

Aster & Buttercup

There's a lot of hopefully upcoming litters. I'll have to go update the "In the Nestbox" page. As of today, January 17th, 2020, I still haven't done it yet but it should be done pretty soon. We start out with prospective litters on the "In the Nestbox" page and then we go to the "Available Bunnies" page. I don't always keep them absolutely up-to-date, though. I'll try harder this year but I'm easily distracted by fuzzy bunnies.

We have nine adult female English angora bunnies here and eight of them will hopefully be having a litter later this year. After Hadrian gets a haircut, he will probably meet up with Lotus, the last one who isn't bred. I don't expect all the bred does to have a litter, though, since I didn't actually witness the matings for most of them.

If a doe doesn't like a buck, she can stay with him for weeks and still refuse to lift up her rear end for him. If she doesn't, then no baby bunnies. Ideally, one takes the doe to the buck's hutch. They generally sniff each other and then the buck will either mount if she will stand still or she will let him chase her for a bit. Then hopefully she will lift up her tail end so he will be able to reach and then when he connects, he will grunt and fall over. This can be within seconds of them getting together or it can be never, usually depending on the mood of the doe. Although, we did have one buck who just seemed disinterested in females.

So when people say things 'multiply like rabbits', I suspect they've never really tried breeding rabbits before. It's trickier than you'd think. Although, it's also entirely possible that all eight of the does have a huge litter and then I'll frantically be building a new and bigger hutch, but I don't think that's gonna happen.

drawings for the new lanai

We have a Plan!

Having a plan is a good thing! How close we will build to the plan, we will see. There's already a bit of deviation due to possibly being able to reuse some of the previous foundation. Although part of that is just being too lazy to remove the old posts and bit of beam, but if they're solid and in more or less the right place?

{insert spooky space music here}
No Lanai! A Door into Space!

Be careful with that first step, it's a doozy. Unfortunately, all we have at this moment are the "Look Ma! No Lanai!" pictures. Mostly because that's where we are with the project. At least, the lanai part, a lot of work is happening inside but I haven't taken pictures of that yet.

The new porch will be a lot like the old porch except there won't be a ten inch drop from the front door down to the lanai. Hopefully the roof won't leak and we will see what the railing looks like when it gets built. I'm thinking of echoing the 'racing stripe' theme from the walls to the front of the lanai railing. Not sure if it will be a solid railing, a solid portion with the racing stripes and shingles or exactly what yet. At one point, I'd considered flat pickets with pineapple cut outs on them. We will see what happens, I guess.

plants growing along the old driveway

We've been at it long enough for the plants to grow

The picture was taken on a windy day. I guess we've been working on this little fixer upper for quite awhile. The plants that were put in on the little strip of ground between the top of the concrete wall and the driveway to nowhere that deadends halfway up the property to the neighbor's lot have grown up a lot since we started this project. It was started last August, wasn't it? I'd have to go back and look, it's been awhile, anyway.

Marigolds gone to seed & Petunias from seed

They're just little marigolds and petunias, but the marigolds have already bloomed and gone to seed. Which, I must admit, doesn't take much. The petunias are the first ones I've ever grown from seed, though. Usually I get them as already started plants from the garden shop or hardware store. The taller green plants are some Crisp Mint romaine lettuce, which is also going to seed. The branched taller plants are Bleak Hall Sea Island White Cotton. That's bloomed, but hasn't produced any cotton just yet. Not sure how it's going to do when it's a rental house since that strip along the driveway doesn't have much soil depth and will dry out in summer if it's not watered.

very wet orchid flower

Very wet white orchid

Orchids are white, maybe one of the baby bunnies should be 'orchid'? I always think of 'orchid' color as some sort of pinky lavender, though. Which would be a very interesting color for a bunny!

This poor orchid is out in front of the bunny hutch, kinda growing in the grassy area around the ti plants. At first, when I saw the white blob across the yard in the rain, I thought one of the baby REWs had gotten out and was drenched or drowned. When I went to look, it was just this poor orchid who decided to bloom in the middle of a rainstorm. We've had about four days of rain and there was about 30" of rain within one 48 hour time period. Hard to get work done when it's raining like this. Usually our rain comes in, pours, and then goes out so we have rainbows.

Jabuticaba tree

This is one of our neighbor's trees, it's a 'jabuticaba' and those are little fruits growing out of the bark. They're kinda grape like and the winery up near Volcano makes them into wine. It's just an oddball picture I thought you might be interested to see. There's a lot of weird 'only in Hawaii' kinds of things around here.

Kissing Bread & Kink the Gecko

Kinda kitchen pictures and not sure if the bread is particularly an 'only in Hawaii' sorta thing, but two loaves baked together into kissing bread this past week. Bread gets baked around here two or three times a week since store bought bread is terribly expensive and flour and yeast are not. Especially if the flour and yeast is bought in bulk.

This little gecko is now named 'Kink' since he (she?) has a kink in his tail. He's a pretty friendly little one and lives under the microwave. He comes out to see if we have tasty things for him. We used to have common brown house geckos, but now these 'Gold Dust Day" geckos have become more common than the common brown house geckos we used to have everywhere. These green ones are more friendly than the brown ones and will come out to see if we have anything tasty for them. The brown ones seemed to like sweets more than these, they would drink chocolate milk and ice cream and such. Kink seems to prefer bugs to sweets so he does Ant Patrol. Yay, Kink!

Kink has grown quite a bit, he started out at about two inches long and now he's up to about three and a half or four inches long.

Road Trip & strange sign

As part of the Fixing and Upping, at some point, we will need to build a driveway up to the back of the little house. We can either hire someone with a backhoe or other heavy equipment to do it or buy one ourselves, do the project and then either keep it for awhile or sell it again. There were rumors of a backhoe within our price range so we went on a road trip to look at a backhoe. Other than some serious rust, it was also missing too many parts, so no backhoe for us. At least, not this one.

Since we were already off on the other side of Hilo, we did a bit more roadtrip and went to visit a tourist stop up towards Volcano. This was a sign on the back of one of the bathroom stall doors. Which would mean, one would presume, that they had some sort of need to post it there? And - one wonders - how would they know that they need such a sign? Are they watching? Very odd indeed.

little baby bunnies

Baby Angora Bunnies - watch them grow

There's a new page on the website now. Kinda a Baby Bunnies Day by Day pictorial. The link is to a page of pictures of baby bunnies so you can watch them grow up with day by day pictures. It was a litter from 2014, but one where I'd taken a lot of pictures and one that had a lot of colors in it. We hope to have a lot of litters this year and hopefully I'll take a daily picture so we can watch more baby bunnies grow up.

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Bunny eating a citrus leaf

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