Headline: Uther Conquers Toledo!

This just in:

Uther Bundragon went to Toledo early yesterday morning.  I’m not sure exactly what caused his sudden departure from the bunny coil.  He had been eating and drinking, but seemed to be in some pain and when he hopped (or rather, dragged) he wobbled a bit strangely.  He finally settled down next to his doe and did the squinty-bunny-something-is-wrong hunch and fell asleep.  I propped him up with some towels to try and make him more comfortable and sat with him until about 2 a.m.  When Oatmeal woke me up (by tossing the contents of his litter box) a few hours later, Uther had just passed on – he was still warm, but his fierce bunnality had fled.  I cried.  Because as much work as it is/was to care for A Bun With Needs, I wasn’t ready for him to go.  I didn’t want you to die, Uther B, I wanted you to get better.  But maybe these are the same things.  He is certainly not in pain anymore, and I’m sure he’s making great headway with the lady buns in Toldeo.  He’s that kind of bun.  And, yes, he’s that charming.  He certainly charmed me.

How old was Uther?  I couldn’t remember exactly, so I checked his Bun Space profile, since I was good about filling in things like age and birth dates when I set that up.  Uther was probably about 5 years old (assuming he was 3 when I got him back in 2012).  Not really so ancient in bunny years, considering Powder and Pyong-Pyong lived to be 14 years old, but older than I’d thought.

All of my rabbits have had very different personalities, and I have loved them all, but Uther was very spssel.

* * *

So, work yesterday was a TRIAL.  Not because of anything I had to do, but just because I had to be there and because I was so, so sad.  Really, try working a service desk and interacting with people while your eyes are itchy and puffy from crying and you have a raging headache.  It’s not pleasant.  HOWEVER, working with the public was easier than interacting with anyone who knew about my bun, because people want to comfort you, and you maybe want to accept that (awww, comfort), but every kindness makes you tear up AGAIN, and even talking about Uther made me miss him that much more.  Awkward?  Somewhat.  And I had a big shock when I brought up my computer and remembered that my desktop background was a huge picture of Uther swimming around in his life vest.  ACK!  BUN!  More tears.  I was a wreck.

Some people were able to be comforting at a distance, which was really lovely, because I could sort of control my response.  Like to the cards and baked goods.  Baked goods = yum (apparently I can eat and not cry).  Cards = I can read these later, but knowing they’re there for me and that people care is good for right now.  One of my coworkers found some brown ribbon in the craft supplies and made little loops of it (like the breast cancer ribbons), which she then flipped upside down so that the ends of the ribbon stood up like ears.  She quietly passed these out to a bunch of staff who all wore them for Uther Bun solidarity and remembrance.  It was a little silly, but it was also very sweet.  And everyone working last night was wearing them.  I put one on, too.  Oh, bun.  How people loved you!  (Or maybe how they love me who loved you.)

It was still so much easier to be with people who didn’t know.  The big event (the one I had to be at work for) – a family crafting extravaganza – was exactly what I needed.  Lots of happy people of all ages making stuff together.  I had the kirigami (this is origami where you’re allowed to cut and tape and glue pieces together – not just strictly paper folding) snowflake station, which – I was informed by participants – was MUCH more difficult than the other crafts.  We’d rated the difficulty of the crafts using Christmas trees.  Mine was originally 3 trees, but after we’d discussed it, we upped it to a 4 and I stole one of the trees from the Melted Snowman Ornaments station, which was a lot easier than 3 trees, and degraded it to a 2.  I felt much less fragile after being busy crafting and talking to people for 3 hours.

Oberon came out afterward to say goodbye to Uther and we were both sad together for a little while, but not the terrible sad I’d been most of the day.  We were hanging out with Oatmeal, who is not sad at all, and Oberon helped himself to some of Oats’ kale.  MY KALE!  Oats responded by stuffing most of it into his bunny face, and acting like a bun who has never before been fed ever.  That’s my breakfast bun!

Rearranging all the things

It’s going to happen eventually.  All of the furniture will end up in completely different places as I get around to painting walls and repairing windows and deciding what exactly I want to use for a desk and what I want to use to set the TV on.  I just had this thought about moving the table I’m sitting at OUT of the kitchen and into the office/other bedroom to be my desk, and then moving the table that’s in there out into the living room to be the TV stand…  And what a mess, because there are things on their surfaces already, and I’ll have to reorganize everything again.  So, yes, yes, I should just go knit.  Because I’m not ready to tackle these projects today.

Dead again

My computer died.  Or it has asthma.  I don’t know.  It powers on, but not up and there are none of the lovely posting beeps and boops.  I consulted my techie go-to person (my brother), who confirmed what I’d been reading on the interwebs – you can test to see what’s wrong, but usually it’s something serious.  And in my case, it’s probably not worth figuring it out – I should just scavenge any bits I want to keep (the hard drives) and build a new machine.

Did I tell you that I’ve become a magnet for Entropy in these past few months?  I moved and all of my stuff died.  A lot of it was old and falling apart and/or had issues that I was just living with because they weren’t *that* annoying (or they were, but I had plenty of other things to do that kept me from being annoyed or bothering to fix/update them.  I guess you can only put things off so long.

So, I’ve been casting off old things for new things and life is a strange and wonderful place now where my feet don’t hurt (because I finally got rid of those old shoes I was wearing and started using the new ones), my DVD player can actually play DVDs (and not just temporarily and temperamentally, but probably not the SPACED series anymore, because it’s not a region-free player, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it – if ever), and I have a bathing suit top that doesn’t chafe under my arms (it can take a lot of time to find a suit with a good cut that won’t deteriorate in the pool in a matter of weeks).

There are a number of things that I’ve not yet replaced – computer speakers (the thought was, well, maybe someone will buy them for xmess and then I won’t have to, but then the computer died anyway, so now it’s kind of a moot point), my microwave (it pretty much went into power failure mode a month after I got it – 12 years ago – and can’t be left plugged in longer than 24 hours or it panics), my car (needs about $3000 of work, which I may do in the new year – during which time it will be inaccessible to me for about a week).  There are also a great number of house projects that I’m ignoring because they’re going to be very involved once I start in on them.

I thought I might make some headway with the wall-washing and priming this weekend, but then yesterday was too nice to be inside (so I went hiking) and today I feel like knitting and watching Harry Potter.

I accomplish a lot of things, but they’re not always the ones that are on my list.  The simple way to solve that problem is to add them to the list post-doing-them, and immediately cross them off.  Wow.  Amaze!

KAMES!

I’ve been going to Glacial Park for years – mostly to get on the bike path that runs along its edge – and before yesterday I didn’t know that there were kames in the park (or I did, but didn’t have a sense of how big they were) or that you could hike along their ridge line.

I was headed over to Anderson’s (my favorite chocolate shop) in Richmond, and my route takes me right by Glacial Park, so after I picked up some candy for the family, I went photo hiking.

I’ve mostly hiked around the kettles and boggy areas. And I’ve taken some classes at their visitors’ center which took us out into the woods (to study plants and birds), but somehow I’ve never taken the trails that lead up to the kames. How did I miss them all this time?

It made me think about the Appalachian Trail and all of the excellent views I missed because I injured myself almost as soon as I started hiking. These kames are probably the closest things to mountains that we have in the midwest and the view from the top was pretty spectacular. I propose a kame-top picnic!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/juuitsu/15345252694/in/set-72157649238192650

Glacial Park 12_2014