Here are pictures of the young birds that spend time underneath our window.

10 minutes talking about: Splinter In The Mind's Eye

I decided that from time to time I will spend 10 minutes talking about something that I'm reading these days.  Consider it sort of the successor to Sundays With The Classics, which were the posts I used to use to demonstrate how little attention I'd paid in school.

The first such 10 minutes -- 10 minutes of my time, not yours -- is dedicated to the book I checked out of the library (electronically, of course, via my Kindle app; I'm not a savage. I don't read books printed on the flesh of dead trees) today:

Posting the pictures counts in my 10 minutes.

I checked it out purely out of nostalgia, although having just watched the new trailer for Episode VII, and having also secured a promise from Middle Daughter that she will babysit for us on opening day of Episode VII so that I can go see it when it comes out, I have had Star Wars on my mind today.

(People who have read my blog for a long time also know that Star Wars is in the running for The One Thing We Will Remember From The 20th Century A Thousand Years From Now.  All history is condensed into one or two important facts, and the more remote it is, the longer the span of time those facts have to cover.  Think about what we, as people, know about what happened from 1 A.D. to about 1300 A.D.  NOTHING. SQUAT. We have condensed a thousand+ years of human history into "The Dark Ages," and left it at that. So in the year 3015, what do you think people will remember about the 20th Century? In my mind it's down to these two:

World War II, the only 'nuclear war' we've ever had, and

Star Wars.

That's it for the 20th Century a thousand years from now.)

That was quite an aside!

So I was thinking Star Wars, as we all always are, and I was looking for a book to check out because I wasn't in the mood to buy a book and I'd finished all the old ones I was reading, so it was find a new book or  start reading the book Sweetie and I are reading for our Book Club. Our Book Club is just me and Sweetie.  We read a book together a chapter at a time; once both of us have read the chapter we discuss it and then move on.  We're working our way through Tana French's books.  I didn't feel like diving into the new one yet, so I instead went to take a book out. I got Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville (Kraken was one of my all-time favorite books but I'm skeptical he can keep it up), and Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which as I recall involved some sort of crystal or something.  That is 100% all I remember of the plot, and I'm pretty sure I only remember that because there's that crystal-y thing on the cover.

And that's 10 minutes.

We Kidnapped A Rabbit Today.

But we didn't mean to!

Mr Bunches and I were outside raking today in my 1 hour of Saturday chores.  That's how I tackle big chores now: I do an hour on Saturday and an hour on Sunday and then that's it.  So far, we've gotten two rooms and three closets organized and spring-cleaned, and I haven't had a whole weekend ruined the way big chores used to.

So we were raking, while Mr F and Sweetie went for a ride in the country (Mr F is not a good partner to rake with.  He gets bored and tries to head off for the lake or a park or wherever it is Mr F intends to head to when he makes a break for it, so Sweetie takes him driving for an hour while we rake.)  And as we raked off the back porch, I heard something crawling away under the leaves into the corner.  I got Mr Bunches over and we carefully scraped away the leaves, thinking it was a mouse or a chipmunk, but it was:

One of the kits (or baby rabbits) we'd seen in our yard the other day.

The baby rabbits first showed up two days ago, when we noticed them outside our dining room window, a mother nearby.  (The mother, in a move that helped cement Sweetie's views of animal mothers as "A-holes", ran away from the babies while we looked.  Sweetie already had a low opinion of animal moms since Mrs Raccoon abandoned her five kids and fled our old shed as The Boy and Middle and I tore it down.)

We hadn't seen them since then, but now here was one cowering underneath a corner-full of leaves on our patio.  So I shooed it out by gently nudging it with the rake handle (I didn't want to touch it and make it smell like human in case that's not just a myth), and it ran off down the path to our backyard.

That was the last we thought of it until twenty minutes later when I turned around and the rabbit was back, laying on the blanket we use to haul big piles of leaves (because our trees produce two hundred zillion tons of leaves per year and the piles get too big to rake):

He was just sitting there, and didn't even try to get away when Mr Bunches leaned down to pet him:

Even then, we shooed him off the blanket again, because I thought maybe he just liked that it was warm and soft and in the sun.  But he ran off to the left of that picture and promptly fell into the back stairwell of our house, where we found him again crouching and not moving:

 

 So by now I thought maybe he was too little to take care of himself, or was hurt or had been abandoned or something, and we picked him up and carried him into the garage, where, lacking any better plan, we put him into an old cardboard box that up until now had just held some stuff from my old office.

With one of our old beach towels ("We don't need it back," -- Sweetie), and then, lacking any better plan and being a bit short on rabbit food we got some dried peas and strawberries and milk to put in there (some sites I read said rabbit milk is higher in fat than cow's milk, but this was only temporary.)

And that was where we left him, about noon, while we finished up with the raking and ate lunch and then did our annual Futile Seed Planting for our garden (this year, we're theoretically growing pumpkins, eggplant, radishes, sunflowers, and carrots).

For most of the afternoon, we'd check on the rabbit -- Mr Bunches named him "Baca", and I have no idea where that came from -- and each time he was just huddled under the towel, not eating anything and not moving much.  

About 3 o'clock I began to think that maybe his refusal to eat wasn't so much sickness or because he was little; one website said that rabbits leave their mothers when they are about 5" long, which Baca was.  About the same time, both Sweetie and I had the same thought:

"We should turn the box on its side and see if he wants to leave."

So Mr Bunches and Mr F and I went outside and did that, and while we were sitting there, Baca just huddled behind the towel, and eventually we went back inside.

Just before we started dinner, we went to take a look and see if he was still there.  He'd left: the towel was empty, the strawberries and dried peas just abandoned.

I got a little worried that Baca would be eaten by a fox or coyote, both of which can be found around us, or a hawk or something.  Sweetie, who believed all afternoon that Baca had been abandoned by his "A-hole" mother -- Sweetie does not approve of nature -- told me to just imagine that Baca had gone back to his house.

"That's what 10-year-olds believe," I told her, although I hope he's just sitting somewhere telling his friends an amazing story about how he spent his day, rather than cowering under another pile of leaves waiting for his mother to come back and show him how to eat.  I left the box and the towel and the strawberries and peas outside just in case.

'Bye, Baca. Help yourself to some zucchini seeds on your way home.