:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

As a Philadelphia sports fan I have been especially bred for skepticism. If there is a way to mess things up, rest assured that a Philadelphia team will find a way to do it.

In the world of baseball many eyes were turned to the Phillies today. With one win they could almost assure themselves a play off spot. I figured it would be too good to be true, and expected a big loss.

Without cable TV at my disposal I checked up on their game throughout the day, and I’ll be darned if they didn’t win. This wasn’t a nail-biter, see-saw battle. The Phillies won in a big way, strutting into the play offs as if they belong there, as if they aren’t really a Philadelphia team.

This is a shock to my system. A Philadelphia team just won a big game, and I don’t know how to handle it. I mean, I’m sure they won’t win the World Series or anything that big, but still . . . I can’t wrap my brain around it.

Philly has this tradition as of 1983 for having horrible sports teams who cannot win championships. It’s our own secret little identity, and we like suffering quietly while others rave about the poor Cubs who can’t buy a World Series, unlike the Red Sox.

Now I need to cope with success and frankly I don’t know what to do about it. Skepticism exercises its grip, telling me that it can’t last. It has been my friend for so long. How far should I let myself enjoy the success of my home town’s sports team?

Our rabbit Baxter is as cute as they come. Small (about 2 pounds), brown, soft, and endearing as all get out, he is a real joy in our home. We are always amazed at how brave/stupid he is.

He thinks nothing of jumping on top of his cage and hopping around while his feet become entangled in the wires. Not only will he jump onto the couch, he’ll climb to the top of the couch and then on top of the pillows on top of the couch, typically falling onto the couch. He loves scampering behind the book cases (and we have many) on top of the small base board heating unit.

His latest trick is wiggling underneath the baseboard heating unit BEHIND a book case. It’s such a tiny space, but he can pull it off somehow. The problem is that we have repeatedly attempted to block off this part of his room (we keep him in a 4 foot by 4 foot play pen) only to find him behind our barriers chewing on the edges of the area rug.

Carpet is harmful for bunnies and the rug in his room is just a temporary measure. All the same, no matter how we arrange his play pen, boxes, gates, and anything else, whenever out of his play pen to run around he always, always, always manages to make it behind the play pen and into the world of carpet fringes and the dark underside of heating vents.

I stepped up my efforts this morning with a seemingly impenetrable set up. Before I was done my other blog post he was back there. How does he do it? I have a few theories, but none of them are very satisfying. He’s like a little mouse that wiggles through impossible spaces.

The problem is a bit complex because we can’t let him out without providing a way for him to get back into his room, and to the carpet edges that we have failed to block off. Rabbits get freaked out when they cannot run back to home base. So it looks like I’ll be spending my weekend creating some kind of Baxter barrier. It’s not the first time I’ve made an elaborate barricade for our rabbits.

It’s not quite a vacation. It’s not just attending a wedding.

My wife and I will be in Ohio this weekend to help prepare for her friend’s wedding on Saturday. We’re making the food for the small reception after the ceremony. No, we are not professional caterers, so don’t get any ideas about asking us for our rates.

We have both been in the grip of the busiest month we’ve had in a long time. My job is tied to the tourist season, and fall is a popular time for visiting Vermont, while Julie had grad school and the regular grind of being in the overworked profession of special ed. where 12 hour work days are pretty typical. So oddly enough we’re kind of looking forward to being tossed into a church’s kitchen to cook all day. It’s a welcome disconnect from the pace of our recent lives.

I’ll be catching a flight tomorrow night after work to meet up with Julie in Ohio. We’ll spend Friday and part of Saturday working on the food. We’re hoping to also catch some time together at our hotel, as I don’t know what else there is to do in our nation’s heartland (a title Ohio claims for itself). 

I’ll have to admit that Ohio is just about the last place I’d think of for a vacation. Road construction, underachieving football teams, and farms . . . they all fit a little better with the Ohio mystique I’m thinking of. On the up side, I did know a guy who had an apple farm in Ohio and it was a really great place to hang out.

It seems that most hotels these days have wireless access, so if that is the case, I’ll be happily blogging in my new-found spare time. If not, things will be quiet around here until Monday.

My morning was shot when I noticed that my sister had joined a Facebook group called: “It ain’t a cheese steak unless it’s from Philly.” I had to join of course. The best steak sandwich I’ve had in Vermont (note the careful choice of words) was at a cafe in Poultney. Though nothing like a cheese steak from Pat’s or Geno’s in South Philly, it was a great sandwich.

Of course one group leads to another. So I found this group called: “You know you’re from the Philly burbs when. . .” or something like that. I fit most of the stereotypes as a former resident of the Philly burbs, but these two made me laugh out loud:

“When every year a Philly team makes it close to or to the post season and yet every year you still find your self saying I know how this is gonna end…there’s always next year.” How ’bout them Phillies?

“If you never took a field trip to anywhere other than the Franklin institute, the zoo, the art museum, or the museum of natural science.” Two class trips to the zoo within five years of one another: lame. Though I think they need to add Independence park to that list, as we doubled up on that trip as well.  

I have officially moved inamirrordimly onto it’s fourth major theme in its 2.5 year existence: minyx 2.0 light. I hope that each time I make this kind of switch it’s a move toward greater simplicity and ease of use, which I think is the case with minyx.

There are still some Google ads floating around at the bottom of the sidebar, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the Minyx theme. I feel like I can put a lot of stuff on the page without it feeling too cluttered. I’m especially into white backgrounds of late and ensuring that the main content is off to the left in a good position for reading.

Of course if you’re reading this via a feed, these changes mean absolutely nothing to you, but at least it keeps me out of trouble . . . or from getting a good night’s sleep. I have the solace that Todd Hiestand, a friend, web designer, and online chia pet, gave this theme his blessing.

If you’re going to live to please others, you may as well be selective.

As always I’m behind in the times, most recently evidenced by my “johnny-come-lately” joining of Facebook. Though blog father Andrew Jones questioned the usefulness of Facebook, I’m impressed so far.

For one thing, the interface is cleaner and easier to use than goliath My Space. Even if the pages don’t offer the same customization options, I’m thinking that a standard white background with simple black Arial font is a good thing.

The networking functions are pretty good so far and the ability to integrate other online tools such as blogs and flickr are great. I’m not interested in maintaining a completely different space, but I will gladly set up a space that puts them all together in one spot.

Of course people with a lot of contacts can be weighed down by all manner of friendship requests, the complaint of Mr. Jones, but for those of us with a modest collection of friends Facebook is perfect. I’ve already reconnected with some great people and even contacted a few by chance who share similar interests.

Somewhere in Vermont or Eastern NY state there is someone with a huge decorative fireplace that used to be in our house. The previous owners of our home left it sitting in the living room; a full-size fireplace made for decoration only and sporting a nifty light bulb somewhere inside to give off some semblance of a glow.

It’s a truly ugly invention that I cannot imagine purchasing. Though the wood on the sides is in good enough shape, the rest looks fake, and the time it spent outside our house these past 3 months did not leave it looking all that flattering on the top.

I’d been trying to work up the gumption to take it to the dump, when the wise words of my father-in-law came to mind. “If you ever want to get rid of something, stick a ‘free’ sign on it and leave it by the curb. People can’t resist the ‘free’ sign.”

So I stuck a free sign on the fireplace after Julie and I hauled it to the road side. We live on a relatively quiet dirt road since it runs parallel to the main road, but we strategically waited until the weekend of Arlington’s town-wide garage sale.

All Saturday no one took the bait, though several cars slowed down to give it a look. On Sunday morning we left for an overnight trip at the family camp up at Lake George, returning on Monday evening.

We pulled in as usual and then Julie asked me, “Do you think the fireplace  was moved to somewhere else on our property or did someone actually take it?” Sure as shootin’, the fireplace was gone. I felt triumphant. The sign worked! Not only did we keep that hideous thing out of the land fill, we saved the cost of dumping it.

While some people I know are having kids or adopting from as far afield as Guatemala, we’ve been adding a different kind of member to our family: a new pet. I’ve already mentioned that we don’t do moderation well, and now I’ll prove it once and for all.

We stopped by the feed store for bedding and pellets on Sunday, right before we hit the berry fields. Julie went straight to the bunny section. Though interested, I thought to myself that it would be neat if they had a brown bunny . . . and they did.

This wasn’t any brown bunny though, this was a really cute brown bunny who settled down by the side of the cage and let me pet him for a long time. Of course I was completely at his mercy. Julie tried to push on to the practical matters at hand, but all I could think of was the brown bunny.

We already have two rabbits (Eva and Evan), but they don’t get along. We have been hoping that we could find a friend for Eva, but Evan, her current prospect, has this habit of biting her, and she happily returns the favor. So I was wondering if some fresh blood in the house would be just the thing for her. Of course that was all a front for my true motivation: I wanted to take home the cute brown bunny.

Our decision was to wait, but we asked for him to be held for a day. Though we wanted to sleep on it, we already had a name picked out within three hours of meeting him: Baxter. We did pray about it and felt peace so long as we recognized he’s God’s gift to us because in a sense we don’t “own” anything in this world.

So I’d like to introduce Baxter, our brown mini-rex rabbit. He’s currently residing in the guest room, but that’s only because we don’t have room in my office/rabbit room. Pretty soon he’ll move in to Eva’s play pen.

He’s a spunky little guy who loves laying on his towel. I dare you to look at some more pictures of him at our flickr account.

So now you know what happens when I go to the rabbit section of the feed store. Over the next couple days we hope to introduce him to his roommates. I’m sure it’s not going to go well.

After finishing my morning blogging, I went to the bedroom to snatch up some socks. The distinct scurrying of little feet on the other side of the room caught my attention.

I saw a gray blur slip underneath my wife’s dresser.

Shoot, I thought, we probably have a rat or a squirrel in the house; not a far-fetched thought for our country home. The squirrels have parties in the attic all of the time.

I slowly walked over when a little nose popped out and I recognized two long, familiar ears: it was just Evan, our gray rabbit. In awe of his ability to escape his cage, I peeked in the rabbit room (also my office) and found that I left the top of his cage open when I gave him lettuce this morning.

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get a rabbit out of a bedroom. They hide in the darkest, hard-to-reach corners under the bed and then cannot be moved.

Since I was already on the later side of arriving at work, I needed something that would work quickly. Rabbit trauma could not be a concern. After barricading off the hallway, leaving only the rabbit room as an option, I looked for a long, broom-like object.

I found our swifter and set to work on chasing Evan from under the bed. After some minor furniture modifications, I took a swipe at him and ended up with an encouraging push that sent him scattering out of the bedroom.

With the rabbit on the run, I kept up the momentum with some yelling and brandishing of the swifter. The results were favorable. Though he didn’t hop into his cage, he did run under my desk.

Now when a rabbit is out, they typically want to go where they can’t. So I shut the door to the office/rabbit room and waited a few seconds. Sure enough, when I opened the door he was heading right for the door,  hoping to wiggle his way out.

I pounced on Evan, pinning him to the floor with one hand long enough to scoop up his powerful back feet and settle him into his cage. He made a few grunts of protest, but soon began inhaling his lettuce as if nothing at all had happened.

Over the past month I put writing on the back burner, save for a few projects in order to finish my home office. The amount of work has been nothing short of staggering for me, and I’ve stayed up well past midnight several times just trying to push things ahead.

The first step was removing all of our junk out of the office, since we’d been storing many of our things in there while renovating the rest of the house. The office is also home to our rabbits Eva and Evan, so they were relocated to the living room and dining room respectively.

Then I ripped out the smokey carpet and the cheap laminate plywood, and set to work on installing a laminate floor. When the floor was done, I patched up the holes in the wall and labored over the sheet rock seams: spackle, dry, sand, spackle, dry, sand, and then sponge. Then on to priming, painting, staining, and putting up a chair rail to divide the upper tan section from the lower plum section of the wall.

To my surprise my new desk took about two hours (midnight to two in the morning) to assemble, not to mention the new chair–bought at half price. In the home stretch I installed 3 4-foot long shelves and 3 2-foot long shelves on the walls, along with a bulletin board and a dry erase board. Oh, I also stocked up a 3-shelf bookcase with my emerging church and theology books and moved a shelf of Christianity books into our bedroom for lack of space.

After moving boxes of files and photographs into the closet, playing with the tangled mess of wires required to hook up a computer, and then hauling our rabbit complex back into the room, I could declare myself done.

So now it’s happy blogging. Pictures of this project and our recent vacation to Lake George are available at our flickr account. Be sure to check out my collection of sunrise pictures.