We collected our surviving rabbit from 
bunny_hugger's parents yesterday. We went right from the shock and mourning of Penelope's death to Pinburgh and the story of that will be coming to these pages soon enough. But last Tuesday her parents came up to visit us, and to agree it was horrible and just wrong that Penelope should be taken from us so soon. And then we were to Pittsburgh from Wednesday through Monday, and today without having had quite enough rest we visited them.
They were happy to take Sunshine, naturally. They'd have taken Penelope if they hadn't been worried about being able to keep up with her presumed post-surgery needs. But Sunshine is an easy rabbit to take care of; she's young and healthy and energetic and ... sunny. Her worst personality flaw is she'll bite, surely by accident, likely from not being perfectly sure where the food in your hand ends and where your skin begins. This might reflect her cataract and poor vision. It might explain the great mystery of her coming to us, of why someone would throw away such a sweet, outgoing, joyful rabbit.
The one unsettling piece of news: sometime over the weekend she got out of her cage. They don't know how; all they saw was a rabbit not inside the pen. They suspected that she leapt out. This seems hard to believe. The pen's fence is 30.5 inches tall. But she is young and energetic and we have seen her make some pretty good leaps. She's more likely to leap onto the sofa, a good foot shorter than that. ... Her pen was also connected to a dog crate, also a couple inches shorter than that. But not all that much shorter. Still, that would be more possible. Or it's possible that she squeezed out through a gap between the dog crate and the pen, created by not fastening the pen to the crate in enough places. The temporary fix for that: clothespin a bedsheet over top of the pen. She could easily break through that, if she were confident it weren't a solid surface.
At our home the pen's connected to a hutch that's a good four feet tall. And we're generally more careful about clipping the pen to the hutch. But if she is so young and energetic that she's able to get out of the pen, we're going to have our first real complication in interacting with her.
We've set her up with the pen we had bought for Penelope. That pen has a door in one side, making it much easier to get into her enclosure and set out food and water and all of that. The door was so convenient I had thoughts, even before Penelope died, that it would be worth getting another like it.
She didn't chew on any of bunny_hugger's parents' wires while she was loose. This is a very good thing, since she was in the room with their computer and printer and all these other things. This is also crazy, since there are few things rabbits would rather chew than rubber-lined cables. Rabbits love the feel of chewing rubber, and cables probably look so much like the stalks or leaves they'd already eat that it's almost the bunny version of candy. But there are rabbits who don't eat rubber; Columbo was one such. Penelope might have been; we didn't really get enough experience with her to know for sure. But Sunshine? She's such a food-oriented rabbit --- and she chews on remote control buttons, or the plastic of our living room light timer given the chance --- that it's just not plausible. She must have got caught moments after escaping. That's the only way this makes sense.
Trivia: Pancho Villa's 1914 contract with the Mutual Film Corporation guaranteed him a 50 percent royalty on the earnings of newsreel footage of his armies, in exchange for exclusive rights of Mutual newsreel cameramen to film his battles. Battles were to be held during daylight hours when cameramen were available, when possible. Source: The American Newsreel, 1911 - 1967, Raymond Fielding.
Currently Reading: The Complete Peanuts, 1950 - 2000, Charles Schulz. Editor Gary Groth.
PS: Getting on to Gillian's Wonderland Pier.
Yeah, yeah, glimpse of Gale Force in the background but don't you love those alligators serving up pizza and ice cream? ... Apparently there's also waffles available too.
Haunted Golf: another something we didn't have time for was an indoor mini-golf. They had an animatronic host, right, who interacted with a ``stuffed'' moose figure not on-screen to entice people in to the golf. The place was crazy busy, one of the reasons we passed on it. If it's true that miniature golf places like this spend about as much on the frontage as on the golf itself this must be an incredible miniature golf course.
Oh, we got a Vegas Elvis over here.