Almost a month ago, Paul posted about our remarkable discovery of baby bunnies in the backyard. We decided we wanted to prevent further litters of bunnies being born on our property. We devised a plan to borrow Max, Tyler’s dog, every few weeks to run around our yard in hopes the local bunny population would get the idea that our yard is not a safe place. So, we watched and we waited for the little ones to grow up enough that they wouldn’t be in any danger if Max decided she wanted to investigate them. The first weekend we considered borrowing her, we had a whole lot of rain. No one had a desire to work with a wet/muddy dog so we put it off and waited a week longer until last weekend arrived.

Anyway, last Saturday we did yard work and at one point Paul mentioned bringing Max over in the afternoon but I made some comment and we decided there would be no harm in waiting until Sunday afternoon to bring her over.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20.

It turns out we really should have brought Max over Saturday afternoon like Paul originally suggested. Perhaps if we had, we would not have woken up on Sunday to discover that sometime during the night another rabbit had her babies in our backyard.

This time the new arrivals did not deter us in borrowing the dog. Max came over anyway, we just made certain to cordone off the area where the newborns were. We also stayed outdoors with Max the entire time to make sure she kept her distance. I did worry a little that with the fresh scent of dog in our backyard the mother might not come back to nurse her young. I worried again on Monday when we had the crazy downpour, but my worry was over nothing. Monday night Paul looked out and saw the mother attending to her young.

Well, Dallas lost their hockey game the other night and watching it reminded me how much I dislike watching the games broadcast on the VS. channel.

Pardon me while I froth at the mouth a bit.

First and foremost, VS. does not use the right announcers. They have half the equation correct, because Razor (Daryl Reaugh) is fantastic, but he’s always at his absolute best when paired with Ralph Strangis. For whatever reason, Ralph is never doing the broadcasts on VS. Instead, the guy the station pairs Razor with has an irritating voice, he tends to wander off the topic (the other night he started talking about baseball in the middle of the hockey game) and he also fails to mention minutiae that I think make the games more interesting … like the fact that this is the first time in however many years the Stars have lost their opening game.

The second thing that irks me about watching games on Vs. is that they have lousy camera work. At least they were smart enough not to bring back the terrible sliding cameras they used most of last season.

And finally, I cannot emphasize how annoying I find it that they are trying to take over televised hockey. With the rules the NHL put into effect last year about no more tie games, VS. essentially overbooks the amount of hockey they show in one night. Hockey is a tough sport, it’s hard to score, easy to tie, and frequently goes into overtime. When VS. chooses to show two games back to back in one evening, they have a distressing tendency to never give enough time between broadcasts. If the first game goes into overtime, it will preempt the second game. When the first game is finally finished, instead of showing a delayed performance of the second game, they just jump right into the game already in progress. With this particular setup in place, people who are tuning in for the second game end up missing as much as the first 10 minutes of game play. It’s frustrating because so much can happen in 10 minutes.

Now that I’ve ranted a bit, I have a feeling I’ve surprised some people with my obsession with this sport. Who would have ever thought that I would get so passionate about Hockey?

Fall has officially arrived. I know, technically it “officially” arrived two weeks ago, but it didn’t seem all that real to me until yesterday. There are two signs that I look for that mean the fall season is really here.

The first sign of fall is the return of the giant demon spiders and their crazy webs. I’m sure there’s a real name for this particular type of spider, but demon spider is what I’m going to stick with. These spiders love our flowering pear trees, and they set up their webs to span from rather high up in the pear tree to all the way down to the ground. Sometimes they even involve the eaves of our house or the branch of another tree somewhere else in our yard. Last year, Paul had a disturbing encounter with one after dark in the middle of our front yard. Anyway, yesterday I saw the first one of the fall in our backyard. I almost missed it entirely because the heart of the web is about 12 feet off the ground. So here’s a cropped thumbnail.

The spider looks remarkably like it’s hovering, but I promise there’s a web, I just wasn’t able to capture it on film. The photo also isn’t as sharp as I would have liked, but that’s what things look like when you’re a good six and half feet below what you’re photographing and the wind is blowing the web around. This particular web is attached to our chimney, the pear tree, and the ground. I plan on taking photos of all the webs that are made in our yard this fall. Hopefully we’ll have a ton of scary looking ones just in time for Halloween.

The second sign that fall is really here is the first hockey game of the season. For me, that means the Dallas Stars game this evening. I’m hoping for a spectacular beginning. Hopefully I won’t be thrown off by their new jerseys. With the hockey jersey redesign, Dallas is the only team in the NHL that has decided to have two very different team color vs. away game jerseys. Most teams just reverse the colors they wear when they’re away, but Dallas has opted for a completely different style. I kind of like the new look, but it may take some getting used to.

Paul keeps telling me I should update, and I agree. I just haven’t done a very good job of it at all this year. I figure writing a little more regularly is the least I can do especially if I go ahead and do a site redesign, add new features like comments, or even make changes to old ones like archives.

My biggest problem is finding something I think anyone will be interested in reading. This place doesn’t get much traffic, which is perfectly fine with me. However, I would like to be able to write something that doesn’t cause my core audience to fall asleep at their keyboards.