Just this past Sunday I found myself reading the paper. It was either that or Take An Interest in whatever the heck the boys were doing at the time. Soupo was on Spring break all last week, so I was out of Interest. (This does not bode well for the summer.) I try not to be too informed about what’s going on in the World around me since this just upsets me, but I saw no other choice at the time. But on the upside, I just grabbed the Lifestyle section, so any awareness was purely accidental. Mostly I just read Dave Barry’s column to make sure he wasn’t stealing any of my material. (I’m watching you Dave.) Right above Dave my paper put in Dear Abby, which I think should now be called “Dear Spawn-of-Abby” but nobody listens to me. That’s kinda funny having Abby (Abby-Spawn) on top of Dave. You’d think she’d stay on the bottom. You’d also think the picture they use would have her eyes closed like she was thinking of England, but like I said, nobody listens to me.
This week’s Spawn column had a letter, which wasn’t even a question, from Angela Carrotmuncher from The Society of People Who Don’t Think You Deserve a Pet Rabbit (or something, I wasn’t paying attention). What I took away from the letter was: Rabbits are not good pets, so why would you get one for Easter unless it was made of chocolate and you could eat its head without it screaming anyway? Angie said they were spazzy things that don’t even like to be held and they’ll bite you as soon as poop on you. She didn’t come right out and say rabbits are mind-boglingly stupid, but you know she was thinking it. And it sounded like Anj liked bunnies. People can be weird that way.
What she didn’t mention was rabbits are quite tasty and a versatile meat course for after the novelty of having a cute-yet-not-cuddley pet wears thin. Pete could be in the pot in as little as three weeks. Also, a pet rabbit is sort of the “mine-shaft canary” for a troubled marriage. If the wife keeps a bunny around she’ll know right when Mr. Unfaithful is cheating on her with a crazy person. At least that’s how it works in the movies. The downside is your marriage is on the rocks, the upside is you don’t have to cook dinner that night.
If you’re thinking about buying a bunny for Easter and you don’t want to teach a whole “Circle of Life” lesson to your kids, remember: don’t do it. It’ll make Angela Carrotmuncher (or whatever the heck her name really is) happy if you don’t buy a rabbit. And really, isn’t that the Spirit of Easter? Making strange people you don’t know, or even really want to know, happy? Yeah, sure it is. Buy a baby chick instead. One of those kind they inject dye into the egg right before it hatches so the chick comes out colored. That’s something that will really impress the kiddies! With a chicken, they’ll still poop on you as well as try to peck the family dog’s eyes out, but they’ll eat all the ticks in your yard. The one thing you can say about a pet chicken, they love a good juicy tick. If you don’t have ticks in your yard, you should think of your pet chicken and import some. Go shoot a deer or something and shake the carcass right over your pet chicken. All kinds of ticks could fall off that baby.
And you might want to buy a pair of safety goggles for your dog. A chicken stuffed full of ticks will still go for the eyes. As a jelly-filled dessert. Chickens are just gross that way.
-Rue.
I can’t possibly respond to this today as I now have a mental image of AbbySpawn and Dave Barry on top of each other in England. :eek:
On the other hand, I think giving pets as gifts on occasions isn’t the best of ideas, especially on frantic occasions that involve tearing wrapping paper, pinning tails on donkeys, or running around the yard looking for eggs. Not that anyone cares what I think.
My kid is on Spring Break right now. I had hoped to get some chores out of her this week, but she seems to think she can sleep in and go to the zoo with her sorta-boyfriend. Sheesh, kids!
OK, I need to fix something here. The comment about sleeping in and going to the zoo. The first did not involve the sorta-boyfriend, but the second did. Sorta-boyfriend lives across the river and isn’t allowed to drive his parents’ car, so the only time they hang out together is when my daughter fetches him. She doesn’t fetch him and bring him home. But she will fetch him and take him to the zoo - if he feels better after getting his wisdom teeth yanked. That can’t possibly hurt as much as getting one’s head bitten off.
Well, never having had my head bitten off, but having had all my wisdom teeth extracted in a procedure that made Josef Mengele look like Captain Kangaroo, only nicer, and having remembered that not one of the chocolate bunnies I’ve decapitated ever complained, I can only speculate that it must feel way worse to have your wisdom teeth extracted than to have your whole head removed, even by Something’s Teeth.
At least the pain doesn’t last as long. And nobody’s telling you to “make sure you gargle with salt water a LOT.”
If I could find a chocolate bunny that screamed when its head gets bitten off my life would be complete. After all, the only screams I hear on Easter nowadays are along the lines of “Daaad, you bit the head off of my chocolate bunny? Jeez! I don’t want it now!”
welbywife makes a wonderful Russian dish. Rabbit in a sour cream sauce. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Now I’m hungry.
Don’t forget to tell your kids that the Easter Bunny is dead.
You say that as if it’s a bad thing. I think that would be one of the happiest things I could hear.
I’m impressed at your self-control, though, at leaving them anything.
The only good thing about chickens is that they don’t fly very well, so you don’t have to lead 'em a lot. Woodcock: tough shotgun target. Chicken: not so much.
Rabbits aren’t too bad either, because they just sit there eating my radishes, so they’re pretty easy to blow away. The downside is that they eat my radishes. I like radishes way better than I like rabbits.
On preview: Rue=funny and welby=funny, while Exgineer=suck.
Maybe I should just go home and lie down, and maybe start over tomorrow.
One year when I was a child, we got a cute, baby duckling for easter…We named him Lenny. He grew to be a nice large white duck. We kept him in a pen in the back yard. One morning, I went out to feed Lenny and there were white feathers strewn all over the pen and the yard…and no Lenny. Apparently some wild animal decided he wanted duck for breakfast. Lenny was never heard from again.
Some girls who worked for me gave me a bunny for my birthday one year (it was near Easter). His name was Basil. He was a cute little thing, and I litter-box trained him. But Basil had this weird problem…his front teeth grew exceptionally long very, very quickly. I had to keep taking him to the vet every few weeks to have them filed down. It got to be a pain in the butt. I ended up giving Basil away when we moved from that house. I think he was eventually eaten by a gator.
Moral of the story is…don’t get an Easter pet…unless you’re wanting to feed the local neighborhood wildlife.
When I was in high school my younger sister had a pet rabbit that lived in a cage in the backyard. Dad used to occasionally joke about how we were just fattening it up for future consumption. I came home from my after-school job one day and asked, “What’s for supper, Hassenpfeffer?” My sister started crying and ran to her room.
So we went to visit my sister and her family in Brooksville this weekend. It’s an out of the way sort of place unless you’re a survivalist. Okay, so Exgineer would have loved it; it was right up his ally. My BIL bought the place a couple of years ago. It has 10 acres, lots of trees and gopher turtle holes, some fauna (what’s not been killt, yet), and a crappy old house. Of course the house needed fixin’, so that’s what Kentucky BIL has been spending weekends, nights and days off doing for the past two years. He’s just retired from the Coasties, so now he’s working occasionally building Corian countertops and spends the other days fixing up the house.
This of course involves lots of power tools - saws, routers, miters, spinners, mixers, grouters, etc. It’s like a hardware wet dream. First thing he did was rebuild the roof and raise it up about 2 feet, so now they have 8.5’ ceilings instead of the sub seven footers they had before. He built all of the trusses himself for the roof. Then he did the kitchen and did his own tile work and installed cabinets and built corian countertops. All very nice. From there he’s been working through the living areas, they have a couple of bedrooms, new bathrooms and a dining room, new windows, new walls. The old walls let light through, that’s how termite and rot infested they were. The ceiling was covered in nasty black mold. All is better now. All the old nasty stuff got burned in a large pit and the ash hauled away. Oh, did I mention he has a tractor, a bushhog, a riding mower, a Willies jeep (he built it) and a WWII vintage truck (he restored it) with it’s own cargo trailer? That plus the de rigeur F150 and my sis’s Ford Escape.
The above post is gratuitously add so that Exgineer will be distracted from any less-than-manly topics which may arise.
Don’t worry Ex, you were almost funny. I mean I read your thingy and my head went back smoothly and I said “heh”, which is mearly a laugh. But maybe we can “workshop” your post and funny it up…
You might have done something a little like this:
The only good thing about chickens is that they don’t fly very well, so you don’t have to lead 'em a lot. Woodcock(you really need a joke here, it’s just beggin’ for something): tough shotgun target. Chicken: not so much. Unless you were to maybe shoot them from a catapult. Like chicken skeet only with seige equipment.
“Pull!” twangggggg! baw-kawk! BLAM! BLAM! (gave 'em both barrels there) piff! and feathers are everywhere.
Well, I’ve now got the Peter Rabbit song running through my head (or more aptly, hopping through my head) and I have no interest in that whatsoever!
I should pick up a chocolate bunny or two, just because biting the head off something sounds like a good idea. Let me clarify that–biting the head off something chocolate sounds like a good idea. I don’t want any of you to think I’m tryign to become America’s next female serial killer (or cereal killer, either).
Technically, I prefer to just take a bite out of the neck of chocolate bunnies–a quick blow to put them out of their misery. However, you need a fairly large bunny for this technique, so it depends on the health of my pocketbook. With hollow bunnies, one can stick a finger through the neck to deliver a similar coup de grace, but my pocketbook is usually healthy enough for me to buy solid bunnies–they are much more filling,* don’t cha know.
I adopted Basil from the SPCA. I renamed him Sexcopter. OK, it’s not actually the same Basil, but our second bunny has that same dental problem. Oh sure, the previous owners said they were turning him in 'cause they just didn’t have time to pay attention to him. I think they got tired of the vet bills.
And yeah, he was an Easter gift too. If this were a serious thread I think I’d have to say that Ms. Carrotmuncher has a point - pets shouldn’t be an impulse purchase!
But instead…
The term “colored” is no longer politically correct. They prefer to be called “chromatically enhanced.”
I’ve already given my annual ‘be sure you know what you’re doing when you buy bunnies and/or chicks’ lecture to two of my classes, three more to go, phew. It makes me feel better to boss people-- er, I mean, inform folks as to the realities of bunny ownership.
Never really wanted a rabbit, especially after my sister’s rabbit incident. Let’s just say that I already knew for sure that rabbits are incredibly stupid (thanks for the reminder Rue) and not to be trusted not to pull down their water bottle and die of thirst on a hot day. Though delicious in a very different way, I’ll stick to the chocolate type rabbit.
Which reminds me, are hollow rabbits the biggest disappointment or what? Their necks don’t even snap properly when you ‘bite they haids off’. Just a wimpy little crumple, and then annoying, low quality chocolate bits everywhere. And chocolate bits of any quality can ruin a perfectly good bra if they tumble down into, well, you know.
Anybody else hate the time change? Stupid daylight savings, sun everywhere, not sleepy at the right time, clocks wrong all over, feh. In my area it’s a mess, with some tv stations on Arizona time and some on LA time and some sort of splitting the difference on some programs. I want my darkness! I want consistency! I want to remember how to change the time on my car’s stereo!
I thought all rodent’s front teeth grow really fast, which is why you have to give them stuff to gnaw on all the time.
Many, many years ago my parents rescued a teeny little white Easter rabbit preventing its future career as roadkill. We kids named him, brilliantly I might add, Mr. Rabbit. He went to live in the backyard along with Mr. Duck, who was originally named by my Mom if you want to know. Mr. Rabbit grew to be quite big and very friendly. Except, oddly enough, to my Mom. She was in the basement doing laundry and the rabbit snuck up behind her, nailing her on the ankle. This was really weird behavior as all animals generally liked my Mom, even the ones who were mean to everyone else. I used to feed Mr. Rabbit lettuce and carrots. I liked watching the way he took little nibbles and twitched his nose as he ate. But other than that he didn’t do a lot. He did sit on the box turtle a lot. Poor turtle probably thought we had frequent solar eclipses or something.
During my husband’s first marriage, they had a pet rabbit. His name was Mr. Bun. He had to live in the bathtub (empty, I believe) while FCDad and his ex were at work because Mr. Bun like to eat baseboards. Not a good thing when you live in a rental.
They also had, at various times, a ferret, a skunk, a cockatiel, a falcon, all kinds of fish and lizards, assorted dogs, and a cat named Killer. Killer liked to sit on top of the fridge and smack whoever walked by right upside the head.
Since he and I have been married, we’ve had a few cats and dogs, and an aquarium once. I’m not into the whole Wild Kingdon thing as he was.
