March 20th, 2022

Happy First Day of Spring

Spring is sprung
The grass is riz
I wonder where the bunnies iz?

Why, in the nestbox, of course! Yay Aurora! She has four baby bunnies nicely nestled in the nest box. She had them in the right place (not all mum buns do) and she pulled wool to make a nest (not all bun mums do). So she's way ahead of the game for a first time bun mum.

This is also Vladamir's first litter, although he doesn't have to do much. With a buck rabbit, they can meet up with a doe and fifteen seconds later their part of the whole baby bunnies event is done. But, Vlad is a lovely buck, nice and sturdy and he did his job well. Now most if not all of the work is up to Aurora.

First 2022 Babies!
Yay, Aurora & Vlad!

There's four of them and they all seem to be doing well for newborn baby bunnies. All four of them seem to be 'self' colored bunnies. Which means they won't have the white around their eyes or in their ears like their mum. Dunno quite what colors they will be when they grow up, none of them seem quite pink enough to be Ruby Eyed Whites, but they could still surprise us. I'm hoping the darker colored one will be blue, but most likely it will be a black like it's sire, Vladamir. But, give them a couple of weeks - providing they survive, baby bunnies are really delicate - and we will have more of an idea of what their colors will be.

New Bun Mum Aurora
quite the 'stink eye' to the camera, eh?

Aurora wasn't real happy about anyone taking pictures of her babies. She had quite the 'stink eye' at the camera. 'Stink eye' is a local pidgin slang for glaring at things. Aurora has the knack of that, fer sure!

Aurora isn't the most friendly doe, she prefers to be in the back by herself when given a choice. Adding in being a new mum, it's understandable that her reaction is to sit in the corner and glare. She will mellow out with some bribes. I think ti leaves and mulberry leaves should settle her down a bit.

None of the bunnies here are aggressive since they're all English angora and need to be handled a lot for coat maintenance. Still, there's a wide range of temperaments within this 'acceptable' range. We don't ask that the bunnies want to be handled by humans, just that they tolerate it. Some of the buns seem to like to be around humans and want ear scritches and such, but not all of them are as outgoing. Aurora is pretty low on the 'want to be around humans' scale, but with appropriate bribes, she will come up and nibble on the bribe. She's still not keen on petting, though.

Amy & Phineas were hopefully going to have a litter on the same day as Aurora & Vladamir, but Amy didn't seem to get the memo. She had been with Phin for quite some time, though, so there's still a week or two that she could have a litter. Maybe she will get the idea by seeing Aurora's babies?

Last month a mini-drone appeared here. Yay! Buzzy is kinda fun, although there's a pretty steep learning curve just to get the silly little critter to fly. Apparently, one needs a fairly specific cellphone in order to make the whole process easy. Unfortunately, that's not the cellyphone that I have.

To fly a drone, well, first one gets a drone. Check. Then one downloads the fly-a-drone-app to one's cellyphone. Ooops, NOT check. Sigh! It was a bit fussy to even get to the download the app site, but got there, downloaded the app and then got the 'not compatible with your phone' message. Hmpf!

So now what? There's a list of compatible phones, but they - of course - aren't the inexpensive ones. However, a friend had given me a wounded Apple I-pad awhile back as a book reader. There's a crack on the corner of the screen covered with clear tape, but otherwise it works. Well, after I found an Apple-happy power cord to charge it up, anyway. Hmm, come to think of it, that showed up from another friend! Where would we be without friends? Well, fruitless, I guess? Everything I've got is PC and Android, haven't done 'fruit' before. The whole Apple thing is just fundamentally different than DOS based PCs. However, I CAN download the fly-your-drone app onto the I-pad and it will fly the drone! Woot!

Here's two of the first flight videos, they're not very good videos, I'm still learning how to fly the little critter.

Apparently, to fly a drone with the complete controls such as the 'go home' button - which one would think would save a lot of lost drones, one needs the internet or at least a cellsignal of some sort. The I-pad can connect to the house wi-fi so Buzzy can fly around here and know where home is, but he can't fly without wi-fi. He won't even take off without wi-fi, I tried to have him take pictures of the house we're selling, but there wasn't wi-fi for him there so he wouldn't even take off. And, apparently, a wi-fi hotspot via an Android phone doesn't make an I-pad happy. Hmpf! Well, that will be the next kink to work out, I guess. I'm really hoping to be able to take some whale pictures before they all head back to the mainland again.

Once, "or if", I suppose is probably more correct, anyway, if some nice drone videos get shot, then perhaps they will be collected into a drone picture page. But, first thing is to collect them and then worry about how to get them online. It took me awhile to figure out how to get them off the I-pad, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself as far as skill level goes.

This is the first yarn of 2022. Kinda rough spun Clun forest sheep's wool yarn. It's from Cypress and Flower, although most of it is from Flower. It's for socks since it's a nice squishy yarn with lots of stretch to it. Clun Forest sheep's wool is also somewhat of a strong fiber, which is another good thing for socks. They aren't going to be the 'wear with shoes' type of socks, but the 'wear while sleeping' type of socks so fat yarn is good. Not that it's that cold anymore, but I have a friend who gets chilled feet at night, so hopefully these socks will help.

It's spun somewhat fat, probably an 'aran' weight or possibly a bit thicker. It's way easier and faster to knit socks with fat yarn than the traditional 'sock' yarn. Socks knit with sock yarn, which seems to be a skinny version of 'fingering' weight, can take forever to get finished.

It's about time to shear the sheep again, as well as trim their toes. I'm sure they're not gonna be too pleased about that, but oh wellos! They don't get a choice in the matter. They'll be happy to have less fleece and be happy with trimmed toes, but they aren't going to like the process. Cypress, the little ram, he gets all upset when Flower is getting sheared so they both have to be tied up during the process. Flower doesn't care if we're trimming Cypress' fleece. She just kinda wanders off and nibbles on grass all nonchalant and ignoring the process. Cypress tries to butt people messing with Flower and just in general gets in the way.

Shearing time is when I'm bummed that we weren't able to get the much smaller Miniature Cheviot sheeps. Flower and Cypress are friendly sheep and have wonderful wool, but they're bigger than I'd like. Although, bigger sheep have bigger fleeces so more socks for my friend.

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