20090722: These Guys Are the Perfect Poster for My More Hay Rant Below
image compliments of Windmill Rabbitry
More Hay
I've always known how imperative it is bunnies be allowed to have as much hay as they want; "unlimited hay" is typically what you read or hear when researching how much hay they need.
"Unlimited" is not nearly specific enough - it should really be "most of their diet".
I haven't managed to find an exact formula for daily hay consumption per kg, but I'm working on it because I have just discovered (after 10 years of rabbit parenthood) that it is perhaps the most crucial element to a long-lived, digestively happy bunny. According to Oxbow, "75% of a small herbivore’s diet should be hay."
I've have always worked hard to provide my bunnies with perfect greens every day. They always had lots of hay around - I went to the local feed supply store roughly every quarter and bought a 60lb bale i'd divide into leaves and store in dark plastic bags - always being very careful to make sure the hay was fresh, green and sweet smelling (constantly fretting about moldy hay - the evils are which are vast and deadly).
While hay was always lying about, I never gave it much thought, and fantasized about a day I'd have enough money to feed my babies as many greens as they wanted.
Turns out (like human children) what you want to be able to give your bunnies isn't always in their best interest.
I had a chance to give our boy as many greens as he wanted - he ate them, and I provided them. Unfortunately this was the worst thing I could have done. His greens consumption went waaaay up, and his hay consumption went waaaaay down.
The result? A gassy, unhappy, sick bunny!
The change? A diet with limited greens and mostly hay. He goes through one "mini" bale of Timothy hay each week. It's in his litter box and scattered about the floor (never in a million years would I have guessed he wouldn't eat it if I put it into a neat little container!). He also gets 20 minutes to 2 hours of outside time to run and play. His poops are enormous, fluffy, light brown and unending - just as any happy bunny's should be.
At 12, he runs around like a kit, binky-ing and playing with his mom and his cat; and when he comes in for a light dinner of fresh, organic greens, he's ravenous and grateful, and then spends the rest of the night eating his hay.
The moral of this story: Never let your bunny run out of hay. Make certain he or she eats way more hay than anything else.
20081107: (started 20080819) Golf. I've always felt a certain sense of awe when it comes to golf.
Years ago, my ex-husband inherited some golf clubs and became obsessed for awhile (I'm pretty sure our inevitable divorce was due in no small part to the fact we are both such intellectual dilettantes. Perhaps I'll explain why dilettante-ism relates to divorce one of these days). I remember going to the practice range with him and being very bored as he painstakingly whacked the little white balls as many meters in front of him as he could. I was far more fascinated with the rattling, ramshackle carts chugging around the practice range sucking up the hundreds of small white balls being continuously whacked out there by at least 30 or 40 people standing side by side doing exactly the same thing.
However, I'm a complete sucker for competence; this may be related to my dilettante-ism come to think of it. I remember the golf pros striding around, immaculately attired, leading their students, clearly in charge and very good at what they did. While I showed absolutely no interest in the sport at that time, a tiny sliver stuck in the back of my mind - a sliver that worked its way to the surface this summer.
One of my favorite projects is the Memorial Golf Tournament. I was approached by a client and friend in 2006 to help out with a local golf tournament that wanted to grow a little - not too much, mind you - just a little. We started meeting in the spring of 2006 and put together the 5th Annual Memorial Golf Tournament. I designed the website, we sent out an email or two using MeteorBytes and the tourney turned out to be a great success. We repeated this formula in 2007 and in 2008 to similar success, and great fun continues to be had by all.
For the first two years of the tournament I gamely resisted any attempts to coax me to play. After all, you're looking at the girl whose classmates fought over who wouldn't have to include her on their sports team (I was so jumpy when I was a kid, I would duck every time a ball came flying towards me - during baseball!). My experiences with sports, especially team sports, hadn't been especially positive to this point, so I was determined to stick to the electronic side of things. I'm not sure if 2008 found me braver, or just stupider; in any case, something made me decide to give this arcane game of golf the old college try.
The afternoon of August 14th arrived - the temperature was extra hot and rising, the sun getting ready to give everyone with under 30 SPF a nice crispy sunburn. I was in the middle of trying to decide if I was capable of living without a car, so I gamely took the bus (with an enormous and noisy bag of golf clubs as my boon companions) from Coquitlam all the way out to UBC. That in and of itself was an adventure (though slightly less of an adventure than the acquisition of said clubs...).
When I arrived, the University Golf Course was a bustle of activity. The volunteers were responsible for organizing over 100 golfers with welcome packages, lunch chits, carts, maps and instructions for the day. All I could think about what the fact I had literally never golfed before - never held a golf club, never aimed the little white ball at the little far away hole in the ground...
Fortunately, people are often charmed (and challenged to channel their inner instructor) by a newcomer (as long as their score isn't dependent on her), so there were many kind souls who were more than happy to help me figure out how to hold the club, set up the ball and let fly. Their information was often divergent (and there were many amused glances at my sweaty, rapidly crumpling copy of A Girl's On-Course Survival Guide to Golf) - I don't think any of them actually agreed on how I was supposed to hold the club! Fortunately, there was a lone, very impressive, golfer at the driving range who was pained enough (by my rather embarrassing struggles) to stop his own warm up occasionally and give me a few tips. His tips made sense and got me through the day with at least a modicum of dignity (only a modicum, mind you).
The end of the day found me slightly shell-shocked at just how terrible I was (one of my team mates eventually cried out an agonized: "You have to count your strokes on every hole, Linda!" - this came as rather surprising news to me, as I figured you had to just keep whacking the damned thing until you finally made it go in to the tiny little hole at the end. The counting thing made sense actually - took the pointlessness out of the whole exercise ;-)). At some point I realized the game wasn't as casual for everyone as I'd been led to believe - that having someone as terrible as me on the team really impacted how their game was going to turn out - so I decided to cut the three of them a break and go take pictures instead. While I don't pretend to be a world-class photographer, I'm certainly better at pointing the camera than I am at aiming a golf club!
All in all, my very first golf tournament (and first time golfing period, let's not forget) was an experience and a half. I promised everyone I wouldn't go back until I had a few lessons under my belt and understood things like counting strokes and how to make my driver work. There were a few awestruck, mouth-hanging-open moments when I had a chance to watch some truly astonishing golfers at work - the unmistakable, unforgettable sound of that powerful "whack" of club on ball before the small missile is launched clear up to the tree-tops only to land 250 meters closer to the wee little hole - 250 meters! I considered 1 meter per stroke a massive success ;-)
20080708: In what can only be described as an act of staggering idiocy, GoPets released (from what the forums tell me) yet another patch that not only does not improve gameplay in any way, it quite literally gouges their loyal base of premium members - members who bring in a regular flow of real-life money to pay for in-game gold. Skills and recipes that were level 30 on Sunday night have now been raised anywhere from level 90 to level 190. Water, necessary for crafting, has been increased from a fairly reasonable cost of 20-odd green shells to somewhere in the range of 5-30 pink and 39-200 green. These incomprehensible and unannounced increases make it nearly impossible to play this game unless you are fairly wealthy in both time and cash, because you'll need a hell of a lot of both if you want to do more than sit and look at your pets slowly starving, never to die, becoming miserable, depressed and narcoleptic.
A quick perusal of the GoPets forums shows comments like: "This is just plain insanity on Gopets part. I really believe now that they do not know how to run a business! Have they all lost their marbles! I am pretty confident that at this point anything that we write or say will just fall on deaf ears, they just simply don't care anymore, in my opinion."; "This is terrible. And once again Thanks for the HEADS UP GOPETS! I am trying to find a few games to replace this one, I have pretty much given up. "; "This is now a pay to-play-game. And it's a shambles of broken, boring, tedious, unenjoyable crafts, games, drops, custom making... They expect people to pay more than ever for a game that is more broken than ever."
CEO Eric Bethke's response to the very real concerns being voiced by his subscribers is weak, ineffectual and insulting: "You guys are important to GoPets and I do appreciate your energy. There is just a bunch of stuff that I have to get done. It will probably be a week or two before I can do a meaningful update."
Let's hope the "bunch of stuff" Eric has to "get done" includes a good hard look at how to fix what used to be a very charming and addictive little game.
20080526 Cute picture of the month from Brant:
Don't you just want to say "Awwwwwww"?
20080506: Interesting article in April 19th's Economist 'Beware grannies on Facebook' reinforcing (to me) not only the point of social networking, but yet another example of its value (yes, yes - I realize I'm a late adopter); a recent post on eROI's Email Days blog further supports this idea with their brief 'Twitter offers Get out of Jail Free with its service' tidbit. As I scurry over to MailChimps' current post on MonkeyBrains (their really excellent blog) 'MailChimp Twitter Updates', I'm starting to see a pretty persuasive case for increased corporate use of these social networking sites that businesses like Twitter and MailChimp are adopting with such innovation and alacrity. MediaShift has a great Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter that startles me a little with just how far behind I am.
20080502: Everything seems to be moving a lot faster these days (she says from the ripe old vantage point of 35...). I recently (and reluctantly) upgraded my trusty Blackberry 7250 to the still ancient 8703e. I spent weeks tethering the 7250 and was reluctant to relinquish the kinship I felt with the little device after so much shared pain.
The 8703e and I are getting along famously, the FreeRange RSS reader providing me with some seriously fun and productive reading while I drive and walk around distractedly. This little reader works perfectly with the 8703e. I had no trouble setting it up and adding feeds. It is reasonably customizable, allowing me a few color choices and full-screen mode. I can also post to De.licio.us while reading a feed... something that prompted me to give De.licio.us another chance.
Which brings me to my original idea.. well, sort of. FreeRange provided me with my favorite email marketing publications on the go, which led me to Twitter, leading me, of course, to begin twittering away (you can literally sing tiny twitters any way and anywhere you can possibly think of); which (how unexpected) led me to try posting to De.licio.us from FreeRange (an entirely painless and efficient process). All this led me to think more on the whole 'social networking' craze - a craze (like so many others) I have valiantly tried to ignore.
I have a Facebook profile, which I have pared down to almost nothing; choosing to allow my curmudgeonly senior cat to represent me to the public (not a terrible choice). Blue aside, I understand why people Facebook, and am beginning to understand the almost pathological need we all have to stay in constant touch with (as the Economist recently wondered in their April 12th 2008 article 'Our nomadic future') business associates, friends and family. Are these sociologists the Economist mentions right to worry that "permanent connectivity" might "isolate cliques...[causing] constant emailers and texters [to lose] the everday connections to casual acquaintances or strangers who might be sitting next to them in the café or bus"?
Not having been extraordinarily social myself, I do have to reach a little on this one, but if I think a little I can remember a time I used to have nothing to do except read a book or look out the window rather than play on my DS, email on my berry, talk on the phone, read the latest feeds from any number of interesting sources and fret about 15 minutes of telus server lag between email pushes. I seem to remember talking to the odd stranger, thinking a little deeper, enjoying some downtime... Today, I often feel like 'downtime' has become a dirty word.
Certainly food for thought as I go back to reading and posting and twitting on my merry, wireless, obsessive little way.
