Next Year

I told all the chickens last week that if they didn't start laying again, I was gonna eat them, and that I was already shopping for their replacements online. It worked! Four eggs already in the last couple of days...which is good, because I don't think I'll have the mental cycles to raise a new group of hens this year.

New Year's Resolutions that I intend to keep:
Stay up to date with all my schoolwork. I'm not paying good money to waste time. Go for a walk at least twice a week. Drink at least as much water as I drink coffee. Visit my grandma more. Make more homebrew beer and mead.

Resolutions that would be nice, but seem pretty damn unlikely:
Learn to read katakana and hiragana (phonetic japanese). Do yoga (more than one sun salutation a month. Eat the vegetables in the fridge, rather than letting them get old and giving them to the chickens. Write posts here more regularly.

Rabbit Rex

Exciting events this week: I ate the first pomegranate off our tree, and I got a new rabbit, who will be replacing the Californian as the big rabbit around town. This one is a black otter standard rex, and he is the softest thing I have ever touched. I haven't managed to get any good pictures of him yet, but he looks a lot like this one:

I really wanted to like the Californian and New Zealand rabbits, but I just don't like those pink eyes. Marta (the flemish/NZ cross doe) wouldn't have anything to do with him either. Can't say I blame her, those red eyes would creep me out too. He's up for sale now, and I hope he finds a better home.

So far the rabbit project has had it's ups and downs - on the upside, they are damn cute little things, and the garden has been loving the fertilizer. On the down side, all efforts to breed have been a fail. Marta wouldn't accept any advances from the rabbit who was supposed to breed her, but when Mochi squeezed through a gap and came to visit, of course that worked. Unfortunately, she had that unplanned litter on one of the coldest nights of the year, and I hadn't known to get her a nest box. None of them made it, and I felt so horrible when I found them in the morning. Mochi is a sweet little thing, but he'd better stay in his own part of the hutch from now on.

In a couple of months I'll likely be adding another rex doe to the herd, and then we'll see what happens from there. I hadn't really planned to have more than one male and two females as permanent residents, so bringing Mochi home kinda threw a wrench in there. I can't get rid of him, though - even the husband sneaks out to pet him!

Fugue

I've been in a bit of a funk lately about the house. I love the place, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it seems like things are going wrong faster than I can fix them, and I'm tired. School and clinical work is a huge time commitment, the husband is working insane hours, and when I'm not doing prenatals, homework, or at a birth I'm just so damned tired that all I want to do is read some fluff and pet the cats. Right before we left for Japan, I discovered that the front bathroom shower is leaking massively under the house (all the other showers leaked, so I don't know why this surprised me) and one of our circuit breakers went off and won't reset, so most of our living room has no light or power. However, I did get a tree and some LED lights up in the corner with the only working outlet, and stockings are attached to the mantle with traditional holiday C-clamps. One way or another, we will carry on...and these house doldrums will be over soon. It is not financially an option to pay others to do work for us right now, so I'll have to put my big girl pants on and do it myself if I don't want to be sitting in a cave in the dark come New Year's.

And we're back

Merry Christmas from Japan! I made it back on Sunday morning, sick and miserable with a cold, and proceeded to sleep through most of the next 24 hours. I'm feeling better now, but still slow-moving and not so excited to go back to work tomorrow. Less jet-laggy than usual, more of a culture-lag.