Hi There Hammy

It’s been too sunny and warm the last couple of days to not take Linus out in the snow to play! He was out for a good long romp and now he’s busy drying off his incredibly muddy paws.

Meanwhile, happening elsewhere… I finished knitting a second New Aviatrix hat for Aunt Carol! I just popped it in the mail this afternoon.

Yesterday, I rather hastily and unskillfully gave Linus a new haircut. He turned out to be about 1/3 the size of his normal self and much busier without all of that hair getting in the way.

Well, this is a combination of today and yesterday. Today I baked some bread, did some papier mache and doodled about a little bit. Yesterday I made a craft organizer, a pot holder, and a dish towel. Domestic, eh? I got the idea for an organizer an all those other fabric bits from a book Ashley gave me called Simple Sewing by Lotta Jansdotter.

New bread and a new pot holder. The bread is from my absolute favorite bread recipe from Bread & Honey.

Go ahead, ask me what Linus does all day.

And here’s that sweet organizer I was talking about earlier. And here’s the craft space over all. Ta dah!

Since it was so sunny but so cold we decided to take Linus for a romp. He hasn’t been in the snow since his last shave and he did pretty well considering his lack of fur.

Headed toward the great whiteness, with a smaller lump of whiteness.

I’m clutching Linus in my arms, my gloves in my teeth getting ready to plop him in the middle of this mysterious snow.

His feet look like little raccoon hands to me.

And then there are always attempts to toss him into snowbanks…

I was perusing the interwebs today and, somehow or another I found myself looking at a group of photos from the Wisconsin Historical Images Photostream on Flickr. Amongst the trumpet-playing farm boys and groups of girls were angora rabbits that looked suspiciously like Linus.

These rabbits are from an album made between 1941-1943 and depict the German’s angora rabbit fur program located in 31 different German concentration camps including Dachau, Thorn and Buchenwald. The fur from these rabbits was used to make clothing and as a lining in the coats of Luftwaffe pilots.  Sigrid Shultz recovered the book when she was assisting searching for documents missing from Himmler’s Alpine villa as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps. You can read more about it at the Wisconsin Historical Society and see more photos in the Wisconsin Historical Images Photostream.

Linus’ old-timey relation.

Angora rabbits in the process of being shaved.

I’m in Oregon, Joe is in Massachusetts and Linus is in New Hampshire. Soon enough we’ll get to take walks again, but this picture will have to do in the mean time…

I shaved Linus’ head and back half today! He has this pretty amazing ruff left around his front shoulders and a big pom-pom tail and ears. This is the first time his face has been shaved and it’s been fairly strange seeing an actual rabbit head peer at you instead of the mutton-chopped colonel face he usually has. There really IS a bunny under all of that fur. I haven’t decided whether I’ll keep the “pimp” version of Linus, or finish it off before I take him to the Walker’s over the holidays. Any thoughts?

Yesterday, Monty passed away. For over a week he had refused to eat, drank very little and was slowly loosing all of his energy. Mom and Dad took him to the vet and were given some liquefied food to feed him as well as painkillers. There were no outward indications of what was wrong, and his blood work came back normal. He had lost three of his eight pounds in five days and last night he simply passed away. Rest in peace mister man. I’m going to miss you utterly…

We have SNOW! I know, I know… there’ll be enough soon, but for right now the inch we do have is pretty exciting. I woke up this morning and decided some hot cocoa and a trip outside with Linus was in order. I don’t think he’s ever seen or been in snow before (he’s not quite a year old yet) so I was curious about what he’d do.

We found this great flat rock with a mini pond in front of it to stick him on.

And, to put it mildly, he wasn’t really sure what to do. His eyes got enormous and he very very cautiously moved his head around and not much else until I bent down and he decided I was going to rescue him from this weird wet stuff.

And he instantly went limp relaxed bunny when I flipped him over. Safe at last…

He’s busy melting the snow berries off of his beard in his litter box. Oh man this is going to be a great winter!