Rock Bunny

 

Frustrated Scavenger

I was in an ill temper today (my present normal), and so this annoying bird received not a scrap. Now I feel guilty. 
 

Bold Bunny Bush Blog

Grass and Geese

A Squirrel in the Crabapple Tree

Sean and I visted Mom for Mother's Day today. A squirrel visited us while we were relaxing under the shade of the crabapple tree that refuses to die. 

Sean found a better position at just the right time to capture a much better shot. 

Pet Epiphany

 Are pets called "pets" because you "pet" them? I'm afraid to research this question. 

Bah-tuna Meh-kaka

I finally watched The Lion King today, expecting greatness given the film's position on many best-of lists. But the film left me cold. I felt nothing for any of the characters except mild annoyance, the music left me unmoved when it wasn't actively annoying me, and I felt the story was not only generic but told in the laziest possible way. 

I didn't always feel this way about Disney films with singing, dancing, and talking animals: I remember enjoying Lady and the Tramp and Robin Hood back in the 70s. Therefore, I don't think it's my general indifference to animals* that's affecting my enjoyment. And it's not as if there's anything wrong with the animation, the screenplay, the music, the editing, the performances, or any of the other factors so important to film. I recognize the artistry and competence of the creators. 

Sometimes a film clicks for you, sometimes it doesn't, I guess. Hakuna matata, as they say. 

*By "indifference," I mean that I feel no particular affection for animals in general. However, nor do I wish them harm, and I recognize that not only are they vital to our ecosystem, they also deserve respect as living creatures for their own sake.

And yet, for reasons I don't understand, I simply don't feel the emotional bonds that most people form with animals, no matter how cute those animals may be. I feel a lot of guilt about this and I've spent my life trying to change it, but that fundamental bit of humanity just seems to be missing in me.  

A Pair of Bears

On the left, a polar bear; on the right, a grizzly. After a lot of fiddling I managed to create a fairly decent base for the polar bear, but his fur and especially his face look pretty unnatural to me. A bust, I guess. The grizzly, on the other hand, looks almost natural thanks to careful drybrushing. I'm less happy with the grizzy's base, which I think looks a bit busy. 

Etsell Horse

Here is a photo of one of the Etsell horses, shot sometime in the 1950s.

The Etsell horses were all gone by the time I arrived on the scene, so I had to wait until a junior high horse-riding field trip to learn that I'm allergic to horses, as I seem to be to all things with fur. 

Morning Chimp Breath

Along Came a Spider

I was retrieving a book from our library when I spotted it: a brown spider, about four inches in diameter, darting out from under the closet door. 

"YEEGH!" I cried, stiffening in revulsion. The spider froze. I threw a book at it, but the creature was too quick, dodging the impromptu projectile easily. I grabbed my scale and attempted to drop it on the spider, but I missed again. The little beast retreated behind my bookshelves. 

I shrugged; there was nothing I could do but close the library door and hope I'd trapped it there. 

A couple of hours later, I confessed to Sylvia. 

"Don't go into the library," I said. 

"Why not?" she asked. 

"You'll be happier if you don't know." 

Her voice darkened with suspicion. 

"What do you mean? What did you do?" 

"It's not so much what I did as…what's in there."

"Oh my god, what? Are you lying? Is there a bug?" 

"There's a huge spider in there," I admitted. 

"WHY DIDN'T YOU KILL IT?" 

"I tried! It was too fast. I closed the door." 

"It'll just crawl under the door! Shove some towels in the crack!" 

I obeyed. And for a few days, I forgot about the spider. 

Until yesterday. 

Sylvia came down to the theatre room to work out. She won't tolerate what she calls "old people movies," so my plans to screen Wilson (Henry King, 1944), a Best Picture nominee about the life of Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, had to be altered; I decided to watch it in my office while Sylvia rode the exercise bike. Just at the point in the film where Wilson was deciding whether or not to allow himself to be drafted to run for Governor of New Jersey, I heard a plaintive wail from the theatre room: 

"EARL COME QUICK I NEED HELP EEAAAHHHHHHH!" 

I charged into the theatre room, imagining the worst, thinking that she must have caught a finger in the gears of the bike or perhaps was suffering a heart attack. 

But she was pointing at the floor. 

"LOOK THERE IT IS KILL IT AIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!" she said. 

For a moment I was confused, having completely forgotten about the spider. But then I spotted the eight-legged fiend and gagged in revulsion: "URGH!" It really was an enormous beast, and my skin crawled at the sight of it. 

Sylvia couldn't stop shrieking. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? KILL IT!" 

I flailed about for some kind of weapon, unwilling to stomp on it in my sock feet. I wound up grabbing the cardboard box I used to prime board game miniatures. Holding the box in two hands, I slammed it down atop the spider, squashing it into the carpet. 

"Whew," I said, looking down at the beast, its legs now all curled into itself. Sylvia started to calm down, but she was still hyperventilating, her eyes wild, and she was starting to cry. 

"I can't live like this," she said hyperbolically, referring to a world that included any insects at all. 

"It's all right, I got it," I said. Then I glanced down into the box I'd used to squash the spider. To my dismay, two of the resin models inside had been damaged by the impact: both nacelles had been sheared off my 1/3125 scale Ptolemy-class tug, and my Federation-class dreadnought (cast at the same scale) lost its ventral nacelle. I grumbled silently to myself—repairing the models would be a painstaking task involving tweezers, a magnifying class, clamps, contact cement and no little amount of patience—but then Sylvia's voice penetrated my geeky reverie: 

"Please take that thing away, throw it down the toilet," she was saying. 

"Oh yes," I replied, snapping back to ugly reality. I grabbed a Subway napkin—we have paper napkins in abundance, thanks to our Skip the Dishes addiction—and leaned down to grab the remains. 

The spider's legs snapped open and it jumped a foot across the carpet. 

"AUUUGGHH!" I screamed. 

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Sylvia wailed. She was both laughing and crying, her eyes rolling around in their sockets. 

Dropping to my hands and knees, I chased the loathsome little monster across the theatre room. Another moment and it would scuttle under the fireplace! With Sylvia's hysterical sobbing echoing in my rattled ears, I desperately tossed the napkin over the creature like a blanket. With all my might, I brought my fist down twice: WHAM! WHAM! A bloodstain slowly spread across the napkin's surface, and I leaned back, shaky and sweating. It was over. 

Sylvia was laughing and crying like a maniac, coming close to losing her grip on sanity. Her manic relief shook the condo's foundations.

"Whew, I got it," I said, putting the corpse down on the display stand next to the exercise bike. Sylvia screeched again, her eyes bulging, speaking in tongues by this point, but I got her meaning; she wanted me to get rid of the remains, clearly not convinced the spider was dead. I dutifully retreated, and flushed our arachnid foe down the toilet. 

Sylvia calmed down a few minutes later, and by the early evening we were laughing about our experience. I can't wait until she spots her first rat or cockroach in New York. 

Colourful Costa Rican Crab

Back in 2015, Sylvia and I visited Costa Rica. While relaxing on the beach at Playa Avellanas, this handsome fellow scuttled up to our loungers.

"WHAT IS THAT THING!?" Sylvia shrieked. "GET IT AWAY, AAHHHHH!"

I felt bad laughing, but really, even Sylvia admitted in the moment that this was a very lovely creature. She just doesn't like things that jump, creep, and sneak. 

Lenticular Crackerjack Elephant Time

While cleaning out my office, I found this, an old Crackerjack prize. It's a lenticular photo of an elephant; move the picture back and forth, and the elephant's trunk will go up and down as if the beast is lifting food into its mouth. Pretty wondrous stuff for a 70s kid. 

The Wheel of Knowledge

I'm taking some time off to declutter my home office, and in the process I'm coming across all kinds of oddities. Here's a Wheel of Knowledge from The Zoo (which zoo?). This thing is probably over 40 years old, which means I've carried it around with me from move to move most of my life. Sorry, Wheel of Knowledge; while I appreciate your 1970s charm, I don't have room for you anymore. 

Earl vs. the Wolf and the Hole

I think this is me, probably around 1974 or 1975. I appear to be in Leaf Rapids, in Churchill Place, judging by the look of the fence behind me. I don't know why I'm climbing into a hole. Also I appear oblivious that there's a wolf behind me.

For some reason I find the cup half-buried in the sand quite arresting. It seems perfectly embedded in the earth. 

Spectre of the Leaf

March of Doom

Sean and Sylvia and I went to visit Mom and Dad to celebrate Mom's birthday a day early. While chatting in the back yard, I photographed this parade of ants marching to devour the sugar water in a hummingbird feeder. The sugar water claimed victory by drowning many ants. 

A Tiger at the James Farm, 1972

Our family has some slides labelled "James Farm 1972." Here's a scan of one of those slides, in which we see a tiger behind some chain-link fencing. A Google search using various combinations of "James Farm," "zoo," "animals," and "Canada" produced no results that seem to match.

Does anyone out there remember a "James Farm" that put exotic animals on display in the early 1970s? I don't believe this was Al Oeming's Alberta Game Farm; I have slides of that, too, and it doesn't look like the same place.

Poor sad tiger. 

The Blue Bird of 1973

Sometime in 1973, either my parents or one of my aunts or uncles captured this shot of a blue bird enjoying the hospitality of a bird house on the Etsell farm in southern Manitoba. The colour is quite striking. 

Road Sheep

Here's a photo of a road sheep of some kind that I shot while on my ill-fated trip down the Alaska Highway. While I lost a car in the Yukon, I gained quite a few half-decent photos. I encountered a lot of wildlife on that trip; the buffalo were the most imposing. I didn't really understand how large they were until a few lumbered across the road in front of my car. They probably weighed as much as my vehicle.