All About the Bunnies!

This morning, Robert and I slept in...until 6:30...then went to the fair to see bunnies.  Many bunnies.  Hundreds of bunnies.  A veritable plethora of bunnies!

Here are a few of them.  (Taken with Robert's phone camera--don't judge.)

We looked at rabbits.  We scratched bunny heads and petted a few rabbit backs.  We talked to proud young rabbit owners and we explained a couple things to some rabbit newbies.  We overheard adults and kids ooh and ahh and say "bunnies!" in an excited, blissful way that reminds me of myself.

But most importantly, we photographed bunnies.  By the end, Robert's phone was down to 3% power and I was on my new camera's second battery (I brought 3 fully charged).  Over the course of several hours, we took a combined 1,000+ photos.  I am not kidding.  This is utter madness, I know.  But what can I say.  I love bunnies.

After we got home and downloaded our pics, Robert helped me categorize the photos by breed.  Next I need to categorize within breed by color.  Then (like last year) I will make a spreadsheet with the count of the photos for each breed/color so I can create a rotation schedule for posting rabbits to RB.  As I post a photo of a breed/color group, I mark that so I can have a current count of the remaining photos in the category.  I did my posting last year with about 90% fidelity to the schedule and I think it was very helpful for avoiding e.g. getting to the last 30 photos and they're all broken pattern mini rexes.  If you're posting 365 straight days of rabbits, you need all the variety you can get!  (And anyway, I don't have any hobbies that don't involve creating Excel spreadsheets, do I?)

I took photos from all kinds of angles, but often the best approach was to get down to rabbit level to photograph them.  This meant doing a deep squat, taking a photo, standing up, moving to another rabbit, doing a deep squat...and repeating this until I thought I was going to fall down instead of stand up again because the muscles in my thighs were so exhausted.  As we were headed back from the bus to the car (the park-and-ride was really great, by the way), Robert asked me whether I was planning to exercise tonight.   I would have kicked his ass for that but I could hardly move my legs.

It was supposed to rain today, and while it was humid, it actually turned sunny (and getting rather warm) by afternoon.  As we were walking across the big bus lot to our stop, I was like, Huh, how is it my hair is still wet...but I didn't wash my hair this morning...oh, it's sweat!  The morning was very pleasant, though, and unlike previous years, it was cool enough that none of the rabbit servants/owners had put frozen ice bottles into the cages to help keep the buns from overheating.  I think I was basically comfortable until we left the rabbit barn and walked in the sun and humidity back to the bus.  Well except for the fact that within an hour of being in the barn (with all the hay that entails), my throat was starting to burn from allergies.

My only disappointment with the day was that because of the timing of the rabbit judging, we were never able to see one aisle of cages, which contained many of the bigger rabbit species and the American fuzzy lops.  But on the plus side, this was the first time we saw lionheads at the fair!  And once you've seen a lionhead, you want to see them again and again in all their wild furred glory.

As soon as we got on the bus to go back to where our car was parked, I was filled with a sudden great feeling of sadness and loss that I wasn't going home to Katy and Leo.  But I just told Robert that I miss our bunnies, and in a minute or two, I was OK again.  So while the daily rabbit posting will start again on FB tomorrow, today is dedicated to my sweet bunnies, the ones who started it all.  Always loved, always missed, always my Best in Show.