Cimorene

We have accomplished stuff this weekend! We did not take apart & put back together the greenhouse cabinet (as I hoped), but we did switch out all the living room rugs, which takes a couple of hours due to moving all the furniture and bunny furniture and then putting it all back.

As usual, the bunnies thought we were having a party and cutely celebrated (excited zooming and binkies). Bunnies actually do clean things - they rearrange stuff in their area that is not where they want it, sometimes making hilarious little angry grunts. They don't seem to regard it as fun when they do it, but when we do, they always love it. They might just like that things are happening? Or maybe it's like they get a whole new territory to explore because the furniture is so big compared to them? Anyway.

We've been doing all this in order to sweep the living room for ten years, but we haven't ever found a way to make the process more streamlined. So I suppose there probably isn't one, although if we had a builder with a garage full of power tools they could make us a modular bunny fence that would be easier to move and rearrange, but that would only shave off five or ten minutes.

I have managed to do some laundry this week! Not catch up on laundry, but I did a few loads of linens.

We managed to go for a walk yesterday! Less than an hour, so not really long enough to get the good endorphins, but long enough to feel like a proper walk. We meant to stop at the cafe owned by Wax's cousin once removed, where his wife does the baking, but it was closed due to an accident. I hope his wife isn't in the hospital again. We bought some pastry from the corner store by the guest harbor though.

Today, with Wax's help, I swept under the bunny cages and changed their litter boxes. The litter box contents always turns quickly to very high quality humus and the hay and dry bunny poops they scatter all over the floor filled two big bins which Wax took to the compost for me. Also she shook some rugs - the ones that don't need to go through the wash (we only have machine-washable rugs in that room, since they need to be washed frequently). The rugs are back down and the floor mostly clean and the bunnies have had a celebration, because bunnies love when the furniture moves.

I learned two days ago, from the Marple fic that Ellen Fremedon wrote for Yuletide, that Britain has a loaf-shaped gingerbread that you slice and serve. I looked up two recipes and it seems basically similar to spice cake, but I'm still really curious. I haven't tried it already because you have to melt the stuff on the stovetop, just like with Swedish gingerbread cookie recipe, and that extra step still feels like a bit too much right now (I keep trying to get myself to make shortbread, but I can't face taking the butter out in advance right now; maybe I'll make brownies instead).

I have been listening to Victorian ghost stories read by a Northerner - maybe Northumberland? Wax and I aren't good enough at Northern accents to tell - while knitting for the past few weeks. (Classic Ghost Stories podcast by Tony Walker.) It has been an amusing and enlightening tour through the lower-than-A-list entries in this period where the Gothic was starting to evolve into the modern horror genre (which I'm not a fan of, but it's adjacent to my genre and Wax and my sister and my friend Ella are fans, and my dad reads and writes 'dark speculative fiction', aka sff horror - so I have osmosis-knowledge and have consumed a few bits on purpose). A couple of gothic works I hadn't heard of have been really great, and the near-mediocre genre potboiler works that always exist in such profusion have given me new insight (to the period and the genres). Also I've heard a couple of my favorite type of ghost story, where the ghost is completely nonthreatening and isn't even doing anything scary, but the story is melodramatic about the chilling/unforgettable horror of them, so that at the end you're indignantly going "This is ghost racism!" I've also heard a story about a ghost hand and one about a ghost finger (both competent but neither good), a ludicrous story about a haunted duffel bag, and TWO stories about haunted paintings (neither really good, but one better than the other).

I'm pretty sure there is no chance of our family ever boycotting normal wrapping paper, but as time goes on I get more and more angry that wrapping paper can't be recycled as paper. (You can GET recyclable wrapping paper. So-called kraft paper is the easiest example. That's what I usually buy anyway, because I usually intend to paint or stamp it myself and then I don't get around to it, although I do like to use fancy calligraphy and address the packages directly on them, instead of on a card. But we have been using up my MIL's saved wrapping paper stash since 2019 and we still have several years' worth of it. But glossy shiny wrapping paper is coated with minerals and it won't recycle.)

This cogitation brought to you by the banana box full of balled-up Christmas wrappings that's been in the middle of the living room floor since Christmas Eve. If this wrapping paper were recyclable it could be flattened into the rest of the paper reycling and taken to the recycling collection outside the supermarket. But there is no public, free receptacle for mixed trash there.

If you have bags of trash that won't fit in your curbside wheelie bin, your only legal option is to take them yourself to the dump and pay them to take them (by volume I think). People don't always do this, of course. The most common thing is that people leave trash that isn't reyclable on top of and next to the recycling collection containers, though in the defense of the still quite stupid and infuriating people, these are usually things that someone who didn't bother to think about it might have assumed was recyclable, ie it's a huge metal thing on the metal container or a huge ceramic container on the glass one. But they leave trash there too, occasionally.

We have the smallest size of curbside bin, and we share it with our tenants on the other side of the house (two adults and their two children), and as it is it is always full, often threatening overfull, the day before collection day. It cannot accomodate extra infusions of big bags of stuff. (We could order the next larger size of bin, but this one seems to work most of the time, and they do cost more.)

I reckon we have about three or four of the regular small garbage bags worth of wrappings in the livingroom here. We could probably squeeze one in per week, but that is still questionable as it always might lead to the tenants trying to take out their trash and finding it won't fit.

Wax finally trimmed all the branches off our Christmas tree on Saturday and carried most of them outside. The trunk is still standing forlorn and denuded in the tree foot in the corner of the room. Rowan was lurking under the tree unobserved while she did it and he still has a bunch of fallen needles stuck in his floofs.

No news yet on the airbnb xmas fiasco or from the plumber. (We aren't concerned about the latter and I don't suppose anybody really expected movement that quickly from airbnb. Or ultimately any satisfaction, although the owner of the property that had already been sold did say he would personally send their money back if the site didn't respond.)

I finished knitting my brioche sweater and it is lovely and soft, but the sunlight has been very gray every day since, and the color is such a pale pink (it's Drops "desert rose") that it looks sort of sickly beige in photos. I also finally made the second sock out of the leftover yarn from the hat I made for Daddy. It turned out, however, that there wasn't enough yarn leftover for a whole pair and I had to order a second skein. So I've now started making another pair of socks using the leftovers from the leftover socks, striped together with some solid colored Arwetta to eke it out. Hopefully I will manage to not have leftovers this time.

I bought some books for me and Wax for Christmas - this is what always happens, I mean, that I just order a present for each of us, because she doesn't care at all about opening presents and she is too literal-minded to take up a present-shopping quest. I can inform her what I want her to buy me, but I have to remind her so many times and give such explicit instructions that it is much easier to buy it myself, and I do not object to buying my own presents on sentimental grounds, and indeed, holidays and anniversaries don't really hold any sentimental value for me either (I just like to buy myself presents specifically around the solstice because I inevitably would like a little treat around then). I think in general if I were really emotionally invested she would put more effort into it, but on the other hand, could someone with that sort of sentimentality have even ended up in a relationship with Wax in the first place? I was in recent years buying us matching pajamas for the holidays, but this year we finally don't need any more nightshirts or nice flannel pajama trousers. (And I'm going to have to find a new pajama source next time anyway, because I require doubled bottom hems with piping, pockets, and drawstrings on all pajama trousers and my previous brand has taken out the pockets. I will make them myself if necessary when our current pairs wear out.)

What was I saying? Anyway, I bought the second volume of Tove Jansson's Moomin comic strips for Wax, which was a sneaky move because I really wanted to read it as well. Both of us have to reread the first volume before we can read it though. I bought a big full-color book about knitting ganseys for myself, and I've already flipped through it all. It was lovely, but the graphic designer or whatever needs to be laid off because it was all typeset in an overly thin gray sans serif on gray, beige, and pale blue backgrounds for most of the pages, which is like... I can read this, but it's also annoying as hell. (The Gansey Knitting Sourcebook by Di Gilpin and Sheila Greenwell.)

Our bunnies are having a wild hair now that they're about 90 in bunny years (expected life span 10 years; current age 9 years), and we've started calling them the geriatric bunny mafia. A few weeks before Christmas Inspector Japp amused us by discovering that he could sleep on top of our padded foot cubes for the first time, and then using this vantage to steal an entire box of Finnish jelly balls. (There were two left in the box and the others were scattered around under the furniture with dust and bunny fur on them, while little bites had been taken from several and two had been half eaten.) He then moved on to eating the round placemat made of woven seagrass from the little table where Wax keeps her tea, and he kept nibbling on this while it was still on the table until it was completely ruined and I gave up and gave it to him. He also started sitting on our armchairs and stole the cards from two Christmas presents the week before Christmas, nibbling on the corner of one of them. Then last weekend he knocked a box of Belgian chocolate truffles off a different side table, which led his brother to eat half of one of them (fortunately Rowan showed no ill effects). A couple of days later he stole a box of pretzel sticks from a different side table, scattering them all over the sofa! Yesterday I couldn't find him when I went in there to check and then found him out in the hallway, where there are no rugs to sit on, lying in front of the cat litter box (???) and napping, and today he spent most of the day napping on the sofa. (He is still eating his food as normal, so at least he isn't in significant pain, even if he is potentially senile... .)

In the media storage era, before streaming conquered, we acquired a large collection of Little Green Boxes With Lids. I use capital letters because of how much I loved these little guys.



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Then, in 2015, we got house bunnies! And they chew everything: their teeth are made for it and grow constantly, like rodents'. You could say chewing things is their hobby, but they're so dedicated that it's really more like their calling. The most important things to protect from bunny teeth are electrical cables, but bunnies will actually chew anything wicker (any baskets or furniture), hemp and natural fibers (they basically ate an entire coconut fiber welcome mat, so we had to get a rubber one)... and cardboard, which includes books. Any of these materials on the floor or the bottom shelf of a bookcase is just asking for trouble: we have a bunch of books with nibbled spines that used to be on the bottom shelf, and there were some puzzles on the same shelf until they ate the entire picture off the lid of the puzzle box while leaving the box intact.

Even after all our media downsizing, here in our house the last few years we still have had our cds in paper sleeves in six Little Green Boxes with Lids, plus our hanging files in four cardboard boxes with lids, and these have been on the bottom shelf for the past few years.

All of these boxes have been nibbled now. Some have only had the shiny paper nibbled off, but others have had the corners eaten right through.



Replacing the cd boxes with plastic ones was easy, but the hanging files are another matter. The cardboard ones aren't sold anymore most places, which is probably because everyone discovered that it isn't really strong enough, making it collapse under the weight of the files with a little time. But none of the places where we bought them are selling anything else to replace them either! (Granit still has the cardboard actually, but they don't have any in other materials.) Ikea doesn't even sell any solutions for hanging files at all. Also no other solutions that let you page through the files, really, just stuff designed to hold paper lying in flat stacks.

Business still uses hanging files, obviously, but the solutions there are mostly built into big furniture. You can buy these racks/carriers in metal or plastic, though, which are presumably designed to stand inside a cabinet, but we could put them in plastic bins if necessary. I'm going to try sticking the nibbled cardboard box (or most of it) into a storage bin first, but if it doesn't fit, we can order a couple of the racks.

Today I went to work, able to be upright and do stuff, without a sore throat and no longer a snot fountain. But still feeling tired and cruddy. The karaoke group was there, so I wore a high filtration mask just to be safe, although I think I shouldn't be contagious anymore.

I went straight to bed when I got home and have opened my eyes only to eat twice, give Snookums his insulin, and do my bedtime pet chores. I'm hoping that the extra rest will enable me to get better a little faster.

I finally got the green trousers I was dying of excitement about (ordered from Freddie's of Pinewood in the UK) on Friday, and so far I've been too sick to feel excited. Still not there. Maybe I'll shoot for Wednesday.

The bunny seemed mystifyingly exactly the same after getting his next dose of meds after four hours yesterday instead of eight. That was lucky! He doesn't seem to be improving, otherwise, but also not getting worse. And at least Wax is back now, though she thinks she absolutely CAN'T miss work to take him to the vet again after missing chunks three times last week.

This has impressed on both of us the urgency of my learning to drive stick shift and getting a Finnish driver's license. She has already proven bad at teaching me though, so I will need to take lessons, and the thought of that time commitment has had both of us put it off for a long time. I guess I'd better make enquiries.

This morning the bunny was still reluctant to eat hay and lying a long time stretched out in his litterbox, though he did eat a bunch of herbs like a good boy. We gave him a second dose of liquid food and made an appointment with the nearest small animal vet, on the mainland, currently around 30 minutes' drive due to the long construction project on our big bridge. (I say 'our' because this bridge is the only link between us and the mainland that one can take by car. It's not actually the bridge to our island, though, but one island over.)

So I'll have to leave work an hour early, and Wax will have to take off as well, but that was the only time the vet had this week. The next nearest small animal vet is in Salo, which is more like 50 minutes away.

The little guy started to eat hay almost as soon as we made the appointment, though. He didn't keep eating very long, so possibly he's not actually getting better on his own? But there does seem to be a slight risk that he'll be perfectly fine by the time we get to the vet. Which has happened to him before, and they actually x-rayed him at the emergency animal hospital that time without ever finding out what was wrong, though we later discovered one of his toenails had been broken and bled a little, so our theory is that he didn't eat for a day because he was in pain. (Symptoms not quite the same this time, though, and we examined him for wounds, including the toenails. )

Today it snowed a bunch again! The second backslide into snow after it seemed to be the spring thaw. Lots of people had time to remove their winter tires already.

We walked my late MIL's bike up the hill to the garage at the other side of the night school behind our backyard. There's a volunteer bike workshop there open twice a week and the guy cut the bike lock off it for us and patched the tire. We still need to test it tomorrow. I'm hoping to learn to ride it this summer. And Wax is just planning to use it since she already knows how.

We also opened the windows and doors and lit a fire in the woodstove, in spite of the snow, to exchange the inside air as thoroughly as possible. I've been dying to do that for a month or so, ever since it started to feel like spring.

That was the last fire of the winter though. Wax vacuumed out the stove and we moved the bunny cages to their summer configuration around the stove, so they have a little private courtyard behind their two cages where they like to hang out.

I filed my nails too well yesterday and managed to cut myself on my own thumbnail last night, and then this morning I absent-mindedly got a bunny bite on the adjacent fingertip AND thumb because I tried to give him a treat that was too small and he missed (he wasn't trying to bite me).

So that's my dominant thumb and first two fingers gently throbbing all day.

I'm a danger to myself.