Add sugar.

A link to Breast Cancer Bras.

Place stamp here.

Oh my darling Sweetie.

He went to a mall yesterday in search of a new mouse, and he came home with this.



Body and nail care products for me! Two bags of gold worth of silly, feminine things. For me?? Cuticle cream, body scrub salt from the Dead Sea, lotions and creams. Bless his heart.

I am not a girly girl. That's what he told the sales person. I raise rabbits and live in the country. His demurring only met with more products that would surely be just the thing I needed.

After being totally appalled at the amount of money spent, I just went with it and did my nails. They look better than they have since summer.

Maybe I do need to pamper myself a little bit. Or at least take care of myself just a wee bit more.

And I have been knitting! This is a little scarf out of my handspun Fuzzarelly Fibers. I wrote out the pattern to offer as a freebie with purchase.



Here is an odd little neck piece, again out of handspun. I enjoyed making this, no pattern needed. I-cord is the perfect salve to a restless soul sometimes.



Claudia's icky headscab healed up well enough that she returned to the barn last week. (It is amazing how fast a living creature can heal!) But I had to bring in another girl who had horrible urine scald. I'll just let your imagination conjure up the images of swollen tissue and infection. Again, she is healing quite fast thanks to vast amounts of anti-robotic gel.

The other indoor bunnies are all fine! There are four bunnies in this picture, all huggled up into a pile.


Lastly, I finished with Emma and am now in the thick of Jane Eyre on audio books at the Gutenburg Project. I have read that novel eight times, which makes me an octo-Jane-Eyre-ian!! Ha Ha.

No doubt about it.

Child cooks food!

Don't we love free range parents, willing to let the kid cut, chop, be around stove!

I think I need another hat.

Thank you, Dotted Yellow Line, for this. Cheese and Crackers!

Rinse thoroughly.

Oh my, how low have my fashion standards fallen since moving to the country. I compare myself to the recollection I have of Eliza Gant, in Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolf. She keeps a boarding house and generally has a red and runny nose. Her sweater has holes at the elbows and she wears fingerless gloves. Maybe the fingers have been worn off. She is not destitute, but in more interested in having money in hand than looking fashionable.

I thought of all this today as I drove to town for groceries. I wore, from bottom to top, a pair of Goodwill boots over a pair of hand-knit socks. On my legs were Sweetie's sweatpants, worn underneath a Goodwill denim jumper that almost reached my ankles. Above was a long sleeved t shirt that I actually bought new from Land's End several years ago, and over that was a gray wool sweater. From the Goodwill. On my hands were hand-knit barn fingerless gloves. I did sort of comb my hair and stick a few pins in before going out. And put on lip stick.

It is good to establish oneself as an eccentric before one gets older. I mean, my summer wear is not much better; there are merely fewer layers.

The weather today has been craptacular. Not particularly cold, as it is just above freezing, but it is windy and snowy and wet. The grocery store was not at all busy.

I want to share a freebie which is the audio books on The Gutenburg Project. I have been listening, while I knit, to Emma by Jane Austen. I read the novel many years ago, but I have enjoyed the sometimes clumsy reading. There are lots of titles available. Check it out.

Allow to rest.

My life. So far.

The so-called Festive Season (imagine "air" "quotes") is over for another year. Yippee.

Sweetie is back to work, even two hours early today. The day is my oyster. So I have been listening to this. I wanna play!




Actually, my day has plenty o' chores that need doing. The usual domestic goddess crap like laundry and dishes. Plus the more frontier woman kind of things like completing the sour dough starter and fleshing Spot's pelt.

The starter is going remarkably well. One is advised that it may take two or more attempts in order to capture the Elusive Wild Yeast. However, my loose sanitary standards seem to have helped. Added benefit: Sweetie and I hardly ever get food poisoning. Being a neatnik isn't always a good thing. Ha ha, you all.

Spot's pelt is soaking in the first brine of alum and salt, and it is over due for fleshing, (removing membranes, fat deposits, etc. from the inside.) So I really need to do that and then place the pelt in a stronger brine for about two more weeks. By then, it should be ready for conditioning and drying, which means stretching the pelt while it dries. One can do this with one's hands or rub the pelt over the back rail of a chair or even tack it up to the wall. The last step is conditioning with glycerine and oil.

The bunnies are all doing well. Good Neighbor Nancy told us that a hawk almost carried off one of the adult outside bunnies the other day. The hawk ended up crashing into Nancy's front door window and was dazed and confused for several minutes. The bun escaped but lost some back fur in the process. But with the Evil Cat and the Evil Dog gone, some of the babies are surviving. Yay!

Lastly, I am still sick. This shit has been going on since Thanksgiving and I am so tired of having my sinuses constantly clogged up. I have declined to go to the doctor for the anti-robitics so far, but I may break down this week.

Insult+injury=fever blister. Last week I woke up with a wad of angora stuck to the crust on my lip. (Geez. Wonder where that came from.) When I sleepily tried to pull the fuzz off, I discovered that it was firmly glued on. Hurt like hell. I had to work at softening the scab, slowly, before the fuzzwad came off. Raising bunnies is dangerous, I tell ya! Vicious!

May cause health problems.

Today was Bunny Clipping Day, as there are four bunnies on the waiting list. I did shear Zero, one of the three babies born this past June-ish. He was a handful and so I was looking forward to clipping Spot. Magnificent Spot.

She was next on the list. The clipping was a little late, but the weather has been cold, and so the clipping has been postponed.

Spot was one of Fuzzarelly's babies, born in February of 2004. She has always been special to me, being the only broken (read - spotted) angora I've ever had. She was good natured and always friendly.

So today, as I took Zero back to the barn after his haircut, I intended to bring Spot in for her slightly overdue clipping. But she was dead. Newly so. Damn diddy damn damn. And fuck.

God damn it!

Her body was warm and my tears were, too. Don't know what I could have done for her, yet I still felt so responsible. Still feel. God damn it.

What to do?

I pondered for a short while. Should I let her go? Take her to the family cemetery and be done? Or reclaim her pelt, which was long and special to me? Could I manage it?

I could, but it was hard. Then I took her remains to the resting place.

I am still rather distraught.

But as I pulled up into the driveway, I saw four little baby bunnies grazing in the front yard. Two black and two brown.