When Life Gives You Bunny Poop … Go With the Flow …

The Land of Bunny Poo

The Land of Bunny Poo – Fine Art Photograph

A question before the start of the story – Can you actually use the terms semi-precious stones, jade, snowflake jasper, wood hearts, wire wrapped silver and gold, porcelain bowls, beach stones, scrapbook paper, bunny poop, and fine art photography all together and be describing the same thing?  No trick question here, the answer is in the photo. Yes!

So, how did this photo of the Land of Bunny Poo come into being?  Well I have been a busy bunny over the past few weeks creating beaded jewelry and gifts to sell in our Etsy shop, Buntique, to take advantage of the gift buying season and to clear away some of the hoard (horde? – never sure of that spelling) of bunny beads that we have here.  I swear they must be reproducing without my knowledge or approval in their storage drawers.

Anyway, back to the main story of making and listing quite a number of things on Etsy.  Continue reading

Following Up On Follow Friday – Vet Visits

Tigger GhostHaving read through BunnyHugga’s guides on How to Train Humans, I swear that our Miss Tigger was the ghost writer for the one on Vet VisitsOne of the first suggestions, one rabbit to another, is to make as much mess as possible.  This had been Tigger’s hugely successful MO. 

In the carrier on the way to the vet, she lets loose with absolutely everything she’s got.  We always arrive at the vet with the wettest, stinkiest, messiest rabbit you could possibly imagine.  If they didn’t know us well, they would think we weren’t keeping her clean at all.  We have started to travel with the carrier bottom filled with litter, multiple towels and at least part of a roll of paper towels.  We know once we get to the vet, there is going to be a huge clean up needed to make Tigger even remotely touchable.  I would like to say that I am able to accomplish this clean up without any transfer of substances or smell.  However, Tigger makes sure that I get a good sample of everything.  Its guaranteed that by the time we reach home between my clothing and the bunny towels I take, there is going to be a washer load needing to be done.

The second thing suggested for rabbits is to let loose on fur, so much so that everyone thinks an Angora rabbit is in the room.  We have never been able to figure out how Tigger manages to open up all her fur follicles, but she does.  There will be fluffy floating clouds of fur in the room by the end of any vet visit and everyone is has a runny nose and is coughing and sneezing whether they have allergies or not.

Then there’s the aftermath, where the rabbit must observe a grievance period against humans. Tigger always comes out of her carrier and thumps, does that little head toss with the look and then turns around and does the flicky feet thing as she hops off with that aggrieved hare air. It takes awhile before she forgives us and we are allowed to approach HRH Tigger again.

There are a couple of things unique to Tigger’s vet visits that weren’t in the article.  So if she ghost wrote it, she held a few things back for her use only.  On one visit while we were waiting, after I cleaned her up, I gave her the cardboard roll from the now used abused and discarded paper towels.  I thought she would play with it or chew it and keep herself occupied.  She definitely kept herself busy.  She retreated to the back corner of her carrier and used the towel roll like a baseball bat to blast the sides of the carrier.  Thwack, thwack, thwack was repeated on and off the whole time we were waiting.  We were in an exam room at the end of a hall with the door closed, but she was making so much noise, the vet techs kept coming in every five minutes or so to check that we were okay.  Yeah, no problem, just a Tigger tantrum going on.  Thank goodness she isn’t a biter!

The other thing Tigger does is a huge guilt trip before we even get home.  Tigger hates to be picked up and held.  So at the vet, I would always get her out of the carrier, put her on the scale for the techs to weigh her and then try to put her back in the carrier until the vet would come in.  Tigger fastens herself to my shirt and makes it quite clear that I am not to put her down.  One time, I didn’t pick her back up fast enough and she leapt up into my arms.  Now I don’t flatter myself on this, she has clearly decided that I am the lesser of two evils.  However, it is a huge guilt trip having those big brown eyes looking at me as paws and claws cling.  Putting her down for the vet makes me feel like a hard-hearted beast of a human.

Good luck fellow humans.  House rabbits think it’s a bunny world, and we just live in it!

Follow Friday – How to Train a Human: A Guide for House Rabbits

Bunny HuggaWell, I expected to be back much sooner today, but nothing has gone as planned.  So I will stick with something amusing to follow.

I could really use an end of day laugh.  How about you?  So BunnyHugga has this great guide – How to Train a Human: A Guide for House Rabbits

Then if you dare you can continue on to see what your rabbits have been up to in the other training areas:

 
Too funny!

Follow Friday – Tyler’s Workshop on Etsy

Tyler's Workshop on Etsy

Some of the 40+ bunny rabbit items in Tyler

I will start out today with a follow, a favorite shop on Etsy, Tyler’s Workshop.  I have included work from this shop in a number of treasuries and purchased the Bunnyland card (picture below on right).  I have my eye on more cards.

The shop announcement starts out:  WARNING: You have a SERIOUS RISK OF SMILING!  I do smile every time I come to this shop to take a look at what is new.

BunnylandThe artwork of animals just being their cute selves is just wonderful.  Even better is that the art is available on cards, providing lots of choices of cards to send to animal / bunny lovers you know.  Or you can keep cards and frame the artwork to enjoy yourself. 

So I would suggest hopping on over and checking this artist and shop out!  Bring some smiles to your Friday or plan to share some with someone else. 

Tyler’s Workshop currently has:

  • 190+ Items
  • 170 Cards – $3.50 to $3.75 with $.60 for shipping
  • 40+ Bunny Rabbit Items

This is lovely affordable animal art!

And Following Up On Friday – Eeuuuww …

Bunny BreathOkay, I swear sometimes the bunnies read the blog and Twitter feed.  It was only a couple days ago I wrote about The Things I Do For Bunnies and how I really gag over the smell of Cilantro. Someone on Twitter asked if I really hated it that much and I replied that I found the smell of Tigger’s SBDs sweeter than the smell of Cilantro. Tigger’s SBDs tend to smell like a skunk has invaded.

Last night, Blaine washed up a pile of Cilantro for the bunnies while I was working in the office.  I came into the living room after the rabbits had finished eating.  I got down on the floor and Tigger hopped over.  She stopped right in front of me and yawned, sharing a cloud of Cilantro scented bunny breath.  

With Tigger, I do have to wonder if she was addressing me with bated breath wanting to know what smelled the worst: Cilantro, her SBDs or the new entry, her Cilantro breath.  I have to admit, I fled the room so quickly that I am not sure where I would rate the Cilantro breath.  However, I know I don’t need to try it again just to be able to fine tune that answer.  I now have a completely new Haiku idea for the folks on IHateCilantro.com.  If only I could remember how a Haiku is supposed to be written. 

Sigh … where is a good gas mask or respirator when you really need one.

Follow Friday – Fet the Tun Rimes Loll

Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein

Available on Amazon

I have always had the tendency to say the wrong thing.  As a teenager, I heard a saying that I had to adopt, “I only open my mouth to exchange feet.”  It hasn’t gotten much better doing things through email or online.  Now I still say the wrong stuff, but due to those fat fingered / slippery key typos.  I have all kinds of whoops going on at times.

One of my big speech problems is a tendency to Spoonerisms, dyslexic  transposition of full words or parts of words.  Here’s the Wikipedia definition with some funny examples:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism.  It happens for a lot of people and some people all the time.  The best example I ever saw was a weatherman who meant to talk about cold air masses, but instead reported that there was a possibility of cold mare as_ _ _ ,  you get the drift. 

So a couple of years ago when I saw the children’s book Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook by Shel Silverstein, I had to get it.  Even as an adult, I loved reading about Toe Jurtle, Goctor Doose, Bumping Jean, Rirty Dat, Flutterby, Batty Meaver, and of course the star of the book, Runny Babbit.  It is wonderfully illustrated throughout with cute black and white line drawings.

What started me thinking about my oopsies was a thread on Etsy that was talking about a feature I thankfully hadn’t become aware of with any of my keyboard slips.  It seems there has been a built-in automatic censor to keep offensive language out of titles and chats.  It has however had unintended consequences in some cases when someone did one of those keyboard typos. 

The thread I was reading provided a link back to a truly funny example from a thread in 2009 (now closed and archived, but still readable).  A woman intended to type in her discussion title as “What do you think about men’s shirts?”  Only she accidentally left the “r” out of shirts while typing.  The automatic Etsy censor replaced her unallowed word choice with something it was programmed to believe was more appropriate for a title.  So her discussion thread posted under the title:  “What do you think about men’s poops?”  Needless to say, it had quite a run and drew a lot of people into the thread. 

Others on Etsy reported it had been disconcerting to be discussing watching birds (tits) in the chats and have the automatic censor change what they were writing to boob watching.  As I program some things on the web for others to use, it is a cautionary tale of not making assumptions that everything is either black or white, on or off.  I don’t / won’t / can’t always know better than users.  Which brings me to a second favorite saying I saw years ago, “HUMOR, never leave home without it”. 

So this weekend, grave a heat time!  

A Sweet Treasury

Click on image above to go to Etsy treasury and view these items

Earlier this week with all the bunny troubles going on, I was craving things that were sweet and light and happy to perk me up. So I created a treasury of items that took me to a happy place just looking at them all.  These would all be lovely buys, so I wanted to share.

Treasury Tuesday – Little Red Rabbit in the Hood

Click on image above to go to Etsy Treasury

It has been an on and off again gray day here, so I created a really bright red hot treasury of items created by members of the Etsy Rabbits team. I got the inspiration for the title from UsagiRabbit’s Punk Bunny.

New at Rabbittude !!!

Bun Appetit
Bun Appetit stoneware rabbit food bowls in small and large size

Today we are announcing a new set of products available in our CafePress shop with our new Bun Appetit design!  Bunnies can go on a feeding frenzy with their own Bun Network star chefs.  We also have our new Shops page loaded here on the blog to show you some previews of what you can buy in our shops.

Treasury Tuesday – We Saw the Merbunny!

Merbunny Etsy Treasury

Click image to go to full treasury on Etsy

 

For anyone who would like that summertime feel with bunnies included, here is an Etsy treasury I created today.