No reason. Just because.

Flock

We bought an old chair at a market in Brighton a number of years ago - a comfy stuffed flock-pattern armchair. This morning Augustus learned to jump up and survey his kingdom.

Took him to the vet the day before yesterday for his first checkup. All looks good. And he's definitely a boy.

Johnny B. Goode, Augustus B. Bad

Oh, what a delight it is to have binky bunnies. Bunnies that three days ago learned to jump up onto the sofa. Bunnies that follow each other around, play together, snuggle up together, and as of yesterday morning also rip into each other with fur-tuft-ripping ferocity and blind viciousness.

Oops.

Seems to me that Augustus at the ripe old age of ten and a half weeks has started experiencing an interest in Snowdon that goes beyond the bounds of platonic friendship and into the realm of hey baby chicka-chicka boom boom. And Snowdon isn't having any of it...yet.

We've had to separate them. Half our living room is now taken up with a pair of dog pens with extra layers of chicken-wire to keep the two apart. They miss each other and it's heartbreaking to see them trying to nuzzle through the jail bars but rather that than have them draw blood (or, in another two months, suddenly decide to throw caution to the wind and end up with a handful of babies).

Went to the vet today. Although it's possible to spay and neuter at 4 months (and indeed most people do), these days there is evidence that having rabbits fixed at that age leads to bone and joint problems down the road as the body was denied certain developmental hormones. So... the vet wants to see the bunnies when they're 8 months old.


This means another five months of keeping the creatures close enough to maintain the bond but far enough apart that we can avoid the pitter patter of tiny, tiny paws around the house.

Poof.

Sister-in-law Michelle came to visit the new rabbits yesterday.

The major difference between these two and Jellybaby - Jellybaby licked everything. Never chewed.

These two have chewed through the sofa, chewed buttons off the remote control beside my hand on the floor (I was watching the other rabbit) and shredded a footstool from Ikea. The footstool was a good thing, though - we left it out for them. It's made of woven banana fibre and we never use the thing anyway.

Lesson learned. Anything is fair game for these two. They even had a go at a library book I put by my feet while I was putting on my shoes to head out the door.

This is them on their (yes, 'their') footstool.

Breakfast TV redux

As I'd expected, the link to the breakfast TV spot fellow-magician Yeats and I did a few weeks back has expired, so I've stuck it up on Youtube.



And bunny photos of the day...

Two new bunnies!

Right. It's been six months since the lovely wee Jellybaby died and the two of us have been looking forward to having company again. Hell, I've got a multi-pack of lint rollers sitting unused in a cupboard and it's been weeks since I've been woken by the sounds of nocturnal newspaper-ripping.

Yup. Time for a new rabbit. New rabbit? How about a pair so they can keep each other company? Sure. In for a penny...

On the way out on a road trip last weekend we followed up on a lead and stopped in the city of Red Deer to visit a couple who had young rabbits. On the way back from the road trip last night we stopped by again and came away with a pair of two-month olds.

So here we are again with a living room dedicated to fluff - this time two different shades. A little magpie boy called Augustus (a name held by half a dozen of Nadine's ancestors) and a little mostly-white girl called Snowdon (after my great-grandmother).

They've barely stopped racing around the house since we first let them out of their carrier this morning. Even with the camera set at ISO-equivalent 1000 almost all the pictures have come out blurry; they just haven't stopped moving. In seven hours they've proved to be more of a handful than Jellybaby was in 30 months. Time for me to get back to work rabbit-proofing the house.

Stampede time!

Just finished a series of street magic stints as part of a thingy (let's not get all technical; 'thingy' works fine) promoting a new Hollywood movie that opens in cinemas today. My job was to accompany a small team of free-stuff-givers, and to do close-up magic for people meandering too slowly to avoid me. Not that I was getting all Lord-of-the-Savannah, accosting only the aged, the young and the sick; no, I was getting all and sundry. On one or two days the crowds were spartan and it felt a bit guerilla, spotting them from a distance, dashing up and unloading an armful of souvenir posters and the like before hitting them with a trick or two (oops, nearly wrote 'large stick', which would have been incriminating and inaccurate).


Reactions? Superb, especially since this is Stampede time. Yup, we're in the middle of another year's cowboy-hat-and-bandana bonanza. Tourists aplenty, some of whom were thoroughly confused at being entertained a propos of nothing at all, and then given free bumf. Out of hundreds of encounters over the five days, only one bad reaction: a German engineer who refused to watch as he had a morbid fear of magicians. I was rather chuffed at having caused such terror; I usually have to work so much harder at it.



Check out the last photo - me, two of the free-stuff-givers and a handful of the people I performed for. What's cool about the pic is that in the background you can see we are moments away from being crushed underfoot by an ebullient mob of Spain supporters celebrating their World Cup victory over the Netherlands - Spain had scored their one and only goal only minutes earlier.