Scene of a murder: scratch one rabbit

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My yard is overrun with rabbits, and I’ve been writing about our various adventures with them as we try and protect our garden this summer. Yesterday I was out playing with Soolin in the yard when I noted her stopping to munch on something in the grass. Ever since Nori got sick eating something in our neighborhood I have been super paranoid about this, and so I rushed over to stop her.

Turns out she was munching on the last scraps of a rabbit that had been killed and eaten by something in our yard, close to where Nori is buried. There wasn’t much left – a bloodstain in the grass, a few tufts of fur, and part of its head. I was original going to post a photo of this, but it was too gnarly. Use your imagination instead – it was part of the poor rabbit’s skull with all the flesh and skin gone, but the eyeball still sitting in its socket, staring into the photo.

Poor, poor rabbit. It’s hard to begrudge them a little sunflower or cucumber after seeing such a thing.

Another rabbit fence story

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Some weeks ago we dug a trench and ran chickenwire around the perimeter of our garden after the rabbits managed to eat up a bunch of our greens. Since then, things haven’t gone especially well. Now another example of how well this is working, courtesy of Susan. She was out walking Soolin one morning this week and Soolin managed to chase a rabbit into the garden. This time, Soolin got into the garden with the rabbit proceeded to chase it around. The rabbit panicked, ran face first into the chicken wire, bounced off it, recovered, and then scampered up over the chickenwire by using it like a ladder.

!!!

Fucking rabbits.

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Taking a month off from the social networks

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I spent June and part of July experimenting with my use of social media. The widely reported Facebook privacy issues left me questioning how I was using these things, so I decided to stop for a month and get a feel for what that was like.

Turns out I didn’t much notice, or at least not to the extent I expected to.

Granted, I didn’t 100% withdraw from all these services I’ve been using. Partly this is because as part of my job I have to use and understand these tools. Partly this is because it’s harder to disentangle oneself than it ought to be. And partly, it’s because I was occasionally too lazy to take care of the details.

While I’ve really enjoyed reconnecting with old friends on Facebook, particularly friends from my college years, the number of interactions I have with them are an infinitesimally small part of the activity that Facebook generates, and much of that activity is just a distracting cacophony – alerts from crummy webgame and silly apps, mentions of sports results, good and bad meals, and what the weather’s like. I get that even this shallow stuff can help me keep my finger on the pulse of my friends’ lives, and there are also plentiful examples of meaningful and poignant events that I get clued into via all of this, but when I balance it against the amount of time it’s taking, and against my conclusion that basically Facebook is not a company I trust or want to do business with, I conclude that I’m better off disengaging.

This doesn’t mean I’m deleting my Facebook account. What I’ve done is disconnect all third party tools from Facebook, including my twitter account. I’m going to begin routing all content to facebook via my website, because I control it and I can be sure I’m not sharing my friends contact or other information with third parties should they decide to click through on something I’ve posted.

This does mean my Facebook wall will be a lot quieter than in the past, mostly because of the absence of the twitter feed. I’m not going to connect it to my website. I am going to try and return to my previous writing habits over on my site to try and make up for the difference but I’ve had mixed success with that in the past, so who knows how it will go. It shouldn’t make much of  a difference to most folks one way or another is the bottom line, and it leaves me with the peace of mind that I’m not an unwitting marketing accomplice for Facebook.

It also means I’ll be a little less likely to respond to stuff that happens on Facebook, because by and large I’m not going to log into the site using a web browser. Instead I’ll use my phone. The iphone facebook app is pretty good, but has some bugs, especially related to photos, meaning sometimes even when I want to look at a photo someone has posted, I can’t. It’s also more awkward to type on, a disincentive to participate in comment threads.

Anyway, that’s the story for now. I’m going to try this for several months and see how it goes.

Nori has slipped off to the great dog park in the sky

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Our black lab Nori. She died on July 7, 2010

Our beloved black lab Nori died last week after a sudden and mercifully brief battle with cancer.

Her last month was rough. In mid May she contracted salmonella and spent several days in the animal hospital. At one point during this I actually thought she was going to die she was so ill. Susan and I were greatly relieved when she came home and quickly reverted to her normal self.

Sadly this was not to last. After a couple of weeks we noted that she had begun to put on weight, and within a few days of that we knew something was wrong – she was gaining weight too quickly for this to be normal. The vet suggested it might be gas and we spent several days trying a medication, but to no avail. Within a week she was having so much difficulty breathing that Susan took her off to the animal hospital.

We then spent several weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with her. They drained 2 litres of fluid out of her during her first visit. Her recent bout with salmonella confused the diagnosis, but long story short within a couple of anxious weeks that included multiple hospital visits and drainings and a visit to a specialist hospital in Boston, we had a diagnosis – terminal cancer, probably in multiple locations in her body, but certainly in her bladder and almost certainly in her glands.

Within a week or so of this diagnosis, Nori was dead.

Needless to say this completely sucked. Susan and I were shocked and emotionally devastated. About the only good I can say of this experience was that fortunately Nori did not have to suffer very long. She had some rough weeks, with labored breathing and a rapid decline in body weight and stamina, but she was a trooper right through to the end, still anxious for her meals, eager to please us, and ready with a kiss and a wag of her tail, even when it cost her dearly to raise herself up.

She died in our arms at home on July 7, surrounded by those who loved her. Most of the folks who knew her well got a chance to see her at least once before she died. She’s buried in our yard, in view of the picture windows which look out over one of our gardens.

I’ll miss her dearly. Soolin and Nori did everything with Susan and I – they came to work with us, they’d usually accompany us on our errands, they were our hiking companions, they even attended our wedding (in fact, they’re the only people who attended our wedding!). It’s a terrible loss for us.

We’re going to spruce up the flower garden we buried her in, and I’m going to get a memorial page up for her on this site at www.metamusing.net/nori as soon as I have a chance to pull together enough photos for it.

Here’s how well our new rabbit fence works – it protects rabbits

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So last weekend we worked half a day, with help from Parker and Steve, to get chicken wire installed on our garden fence. 300′ of fence, buried ~6″ deep and stapled to the existing wooden rail fence. This after I spent several weeks digging the trench around the exterior of the fence.

Yesterday I let the dogs out to do their morning business, and Soolin went zipping off towards the garden, barking. Turns out she had spotted a rabbit. Said rabbit? Inside the fence. Soolin? Stuck outside the fence. Soolin, apparently our only effective rabbit deterrent, was reduced to running furiously up and down the perimeter of the fence, barking madly but impotently. Eventually the rabbit scooted out of the fence and into the nearby shrubbery, but its point was made. We’re debating our next move.

Friday fun: Hydorah

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Inspired by arcade games from the 80’s, Hydorah‘s a very capable riff on the classic old shootemup Gradius. It’s free, runs only on windows, and is pretty damned difficult. Definitely check it out if you grew up in the 80’s and enjoy shootemups. Here’s a video to give a sense of how it plays:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7066986&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Hydorah Official Trailer from Locomalito on Vimeo.