A couple months ago in an event that shook our faith in the community, our rabbit statue was stolen. It had rested in front of the house for about a decade and sometime during the spring --- we're not sure just when, because we just didn't look hard enough to see it --- it went missing. We've intended to replace it since but hadn't got to a garden store that had rabbits.
Finally though we had the chance, stopping at one with row after row of statues on palettes. There were rows of purely religious statues, or birdbaths, a row and a half of lions, with a couple tigers and a pair of giraffes for good measure. The giraffes were by the way taller than me so goodness knows how you're even supposed to get them home, much less place them anywhere. There was a whole squadron of dogs looking alert, too, and dragons and unicorns, chickens and sea serpents, otters and frogs and cats and raccoons and more. It seemed like if we really wanted we could probably build our own Fairy Tale Village walk-through attraction from the stuff just on sale then. (This might become our retirement plan.)
We found a pretty good-looking rabbit (or hare), one standing on its hindlegs and looking pretty alert, which isn't exactly the pose of our old one but still should look great out in the yard. It lacked any price so the clerk offered it to us at $50, which works out to about a dollar a pound, although it did prove to have a number of cracks in the base requiring sealing up. We also thought very, very hard about some raccoon statues. We did also pick up a rather aged fish statue that can be used as a spitter, circulating water back into the pond; we've needed one for a long while and now it's just too late to put in for the winter. But we'll be ready for spring.
Trivia: The James Monroe, the first Liverpool-bound packet to leave New York City, carried eight passengers on its inaugural trip (it had room for 28) when it left on 5 January 1818, as well as a small cargo of Virginia apples, midwestern flour, Vermont wool, Maine cranberries, Georgia cotton, and some Florida turpentine. Source: Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, Simon Winchester.
Currently Reading: New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, Editors Maxine N Lurie, Richard Veit.
PS: Reading the Comics, October 7, 2014: Repeated Comics Edition, first of these since the last mathematics topics roundup.