Day three [2 weeks, 6 days to spay]
Well, it's a complete about face. No, they don't want to be together, but now Boeing is top bun and it's really kind of sad. It's funny when the little one bullies the big one, but not so funny the other way. Mind you, Boeing doesn't really bully. She just follows Squeeze wherever she goes, at top speed. Squeeze, consequently, is terror-ridden [not sure why; clearly it's an overreaction, since there's no hurt being inflicted upon her that we can see].
So as of today, they won't be allowed out together at all until after the hormones go bye bye. Two weeks, 6 days. Then, once they're healed, we can start putting them together for short periods on neutral territory and hope we can re-bond them. Which is exactly what we didn't want to have to do. But we'll deal.
Questions about spaying, briefly answered. Whenever you put a rabbit under a general anesthetic, it's a risk to their delicate systems. For boys, the operation [as I understand it] is much simpler to recover from and so they can tolerate it at an earlier age. But for girls, it's a full removal of ovaries and uterus, plus the anesthetic, so it's recommended not to do the surgery before 6 months if you can.
The humping is SO clearly not about pleasure, Dr. Steph. It's about innate urges these little freaks don't understand in the slightest. Being a prey animal isn't much fun, and though bunnies have been housepets for years, they haven't been domesticated as long as cats or dogs. There's still a lot of wild in them. It's all about self preservation and reproduction.
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In other news, I'm getting more done with the new living room arrangement. It's easier to be a sack of potatoes on a couch than in a nice chair with an ottoman. The work does include knitting, which means that progress continues on the slate Frog Tree cotton v-necked raglan. Back done, front 1/2 done. I'd like to finish it over the holidays, but will not push. We'll see.
My new watch came, and it's lovely. It glows in the dark with no pressing of buttons required. Nice.
Research materials for No Sheep continue to arrive, and I'm building quite a decent fiber reference library. One of the books I'd never have wanted to even open a year ago, but now I'm ecstatic to have my own copy, cause it's full of actual scientific data and stuff. Real data! Based on experiments and tests done by a real scientist! Even!
It'll be nice to be authoritative about this stuff when the time comes. No, I can't be more specific than that.
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In other whimsical news, looks like I'll be published in Japan shortly. Well, not exactly as planned, but still! A new Blythe book is coming out and it was supposed to have a hat pattern in it, designed by me. But there were complications with the way Japanese patterns are written, and so instead, my hats were photographed on cool Blythes I've never met, and the picture is in the book with a URL to the English version of the pattern on the Knitty site.
Thankfully, though I was a bit brain dead when I had to send the hats to Japan [right after the accident in Cape Cod], I did have the presence of mind to take pictures of each hat on one of my Blythes, which means I'll have a nice pattern page to share with y'all when I can. In a few weeks, probably.
The book is called Darling Blythe. Eee!