He wouldn't put any weight on his rear right leg, so... by taking him, it was an emergency visit. Thank god that since the vet moved, they're now also a 24-hour exotic animal emergency hospital.

(I hate to say this, but I love going to our vet. Because they specialize in birds and exotics, you never know what you're going to see in the waiting room).

So, the doctor took some x-rays and as long as he was sedated, clipped his nails) but nothing showed up. Nothing is broken, so may have just wrenched a muscle or tendon.

Well, we readily admit it... he haven't been good bunny parents and have neglected to trim his nails of late. Chip just LOVES to run, so we're not surprised that maybe he caught a toenail and twisted something. So, we have pain medication that we'll give him and keep him confined and see what happens.

As long as she was home, Carol called the vet to see if we could get Indy into the vet today. Indy still wasn't really eating - she'd take a few bites of lettuce and stop, take afew bites of carrot and stop, take few bites of hay and stop, but drink as much water as she wanted. She was also getting "quieter" and Chip was really bothering her. Carol couldn't get an appointment until 5:30, so I got home after work and immediately took off for the vet. This was the first time we visited the new facility. It's not all that easy to get to for us, but at least we know the area, so we can take shortcuts depending on traffic.

So, the doc checked her all out, put her under anesthesia to xray her (and clip her toenails) and then did... a dental exam. Out of all the years we've had rabbits, non of our bunnies ever had dental issues - until now. She had problems with her molars having grown "unusually" and were probably hurting her gums or cheek, so the doc worked on them (probably with a dremmel).

A tech brought her back to the exam room, still a little woozy. She went right back into her carrier and settled down. After a while, we could hear her grinding her teath. She looked different. On the way home, she looked much more relaxed than the trip into the city. Sure enough, first thing she does when she gets home is eat.

Speaking of Indy... there's another Indy on TV today - the Indianapolis 500.

WHY THE HELL CAN'T ABC BROADCAST THE INDY 500 IN HD? Hell, Fox broadcasts all of the NASCAR events in HD, and this is a special event! What the hell!

We had to get new blinds for the bedroom - the one on my side of the bed actually started to fall apart from all that exposure to the sun after all of these years. Carol went to Lowes and had some blinds cut to size... too bad they were the wrong size. At least she had them cut too long so she could go back and take some more off. After she struggled with that, then we had to change the mounting hardware... Let's just say the task took way longer than either of us thought. Then, when everything was done, we rushed to the AMC South Barrington 30 to catch a 3:10 showing of Mission: Impossible III.

Eh.

It was OK (I got over my Tom Cruise issues quickly), and there was a LOT of action, but... I don't know, it seemed a little implausible (what? an IMF Mission being implausible? Well, it wasn't the mission - it was the fact an IMF agent would get married to someone that doesn't know what he really does for a living - I think that was my problem)

UPDATE: On Thursday night, ABC broadcast the Scripps Spelling Bee. LIVE. IN HDTV

I have posted this entry with a future date so it will "stick" here until Easter Sunday, when it will start rolling around, just like any other entry.

I know I don't get a lot of traffic here at this Blog, but, please, take a moment to read this and help out this cause.

Carol and I have a pet rabbit named Indy and another that's only been with us about a year and a half, Chip. (They have there own WebCam over on the Right-hand side of the page, if you want to visit). We love Indy and Chip, and have loved the rabbits that have been part of our life over the past 20 years. They're different, but fun - and very loving. I think that's the one thing that has surprised me the most over the years - how affectionate they can really be. This past year, we've experienced what it's like to have two rabbits together, and even that seems special. They're inseparable, always together, always grooming, yet always running up to us for attention and their "lovin'" (which is us petting them).

Every year, at Easter time, people think about buying a rabbit for their kids. Bunnies really are great, but they have special needs and care and are not like dogs & cats. There are many rabbits that are abandoned each year after Easter when the kids lose interest or when they become a burden to the owners.

If you have a website, please visit the Easter Page at the House Rabbit Society's website and get a banner to put on your page until after Easter (April 16 for those that don't know) to help raise awareness of the problem. There are also PDF's to print up and post in your cubicle of wherever if you'd like to do that to help spread the word (as well as a damn sad poem that just rips at our heartstrings). Please slso visit the site of their new campaign - "Make Mine Chocolate!" for additional flyers, business cards, and postcards.

Indy thanks you, Chip thanks you, and Carol & I thank you.

I saw this in a post on Boing Boing.

The Volcano Rabbit (or zacatuche or Romerolagus diazi)

They live in the Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands of Mexico, and is endemic to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt surrounding Mexico City, where volcanoes and rabbits co-exist.

Well, sort of. They're endangered.

Who would have thought?

When we came home, we found Indy on the bottom floor of the Bunny Condo, looking weird.

She looked exactly like last week - dizzy. Vertigo. We didn't panic, since the vet told us that that she could have been having these problems all along (and could be because of her age). She was having a little bit of trouble moving around the cage, and her head was gently moving side-to-side like her world was spinning.

But she acted fine. She wasn't really concerned, she just didn't move around a lot. After a few minutes she actually walked out of the cage and was grooming herself. The she would do her loooooong stretch and shake her head - only this time, she stopped shaking her head quickly and you could almost see he stagger to the side.

And she was fine. A few more minutes would pass and she would be running around the room and eating hay. Other than the whole vertigo thing, she seems pretty unaffected by whatever is causing this. Maybe this has been happening for a while - she's adapting to her spells pretty quickly.

Scares the hell out of us, though. Hope that this isn't an indication of something worse on the horizon.

Indy's doctor can't find a thing wrong with her.

She's fine and exhibiting no symptoms. Of anything. So, she's coming home.

It could have been a mini-stroke, a seizure, or something else. At her age, it's up to us how aggressive we want to be. She could have had these episodes before and this was the first one we've seen.

She's alert, eating and just being a bunny.

So, Carol's pretty tired, so she's hitting the road. I'll check on Indy at lunch.

Indy had a sudden problem overnight and we left her with the emergency vet until later this morning when carol is going to pick her up and bring her to our normal vet

The story starts when Carol can't get to sleep, so she goes downstairs at about 12:30. Indy is laying on the bottom floor of her condo, not really moving. Carol had to pull her out of the cage to get her to move, which is not like her. After observing her, Carol came back upstairs and woke me up to tell me what she saw.

We went back downstairs and there's Indy, lying on the floor, looking normal. I pet her, she licked me. Carol gets upset because now she looks normal. Indy gets up and walks away and looks fine.

Then she starts to move again, and she isn't moving right - her head starts to bob side-to-side, almost as if she has vertigo and is dizzy and can't focus. She walks haltingly to the side, as if she was dizzy and she was trying to catch herself from falling over. Eventually, she just lays down, knowing that the world around her stops spinning if she's not standing up. When I pet her, she vibrates - her signal that she is in distress.

So, it's time to make another trip to Animal 911 in Skokie. The place was busy - and you know that anyone that's taking their pet to the vet at 1 in the morning can't be having a good time. I saw many people in despair over their pets. Indy was whisked-away as soon as we got there - the problem was there were many other patients in much more critical need than her. After 2 hours, we finally talked to the doctor. It is one of two things - inner ear infection or stroke. (In my mind, the ear infection matches pretty well - she's alert, she's eating (which - if something really was wrong, she wouldn't do) she's aware of her surroundings and what's going on around her, and that doesn't sound like stroke), though she is up in age (she's almost 8 and that's petty old for a rabbit).

Indy is staying overnight for observation while they give her antibiotics. Carol will pick her up and get her to our "primary care vet" who specializes in exotic animals (and a bunny, it turns out, falls into the exotic category).

All this in just a few hours.

When we got home, Chip looked lonely, sad, and confused.

He was young when Indy had her problems before, and it was before they were socialized, so he's never really known life without his partner.

And just looking at his posture and his face - he doesn't like being without her.

Ditto for her "parents".

Today, Chip is still the smaller of the two bunnies, but he's what we've been calling a "bruiser". When you pet Indy, she's soft and silky, but you also notice that she's got more skin than bones and her skin kind of moves around (she was heavier and has lost weight over the past year or two - she's at a much healthier weight now). When you pet Chip, you notice that his fur is a little courser (not as silky as Indy) but he's all muscle - just built like a tank. And no wonder - the kid is constantly running around, sometimes just running in circles, tossing his head. He's happy and he shows it a lot. He's also sort of a rebelling teenager. He's always doing things we don't want him to do, and always grunting to show he doesn't like it when we yell at him to stop doing something. His latest "thing" is that he loves to "shovel" - he stopped digging (using his front paws to rapidly dig at something) and now he's shoveling, where he'll reach forward with both paws and scoop up whatever bedding or whatever is available and throw the whole lot through his back legs.

Something that Chip loves to do which fits his "bruiser" moniker is that he loves picking up things. He'll go after a section of the newspaper that we may have just read (or sometimes, may not have read if he jumps up onto the couch), and grab the corner and pull it up in the air. He'll start doing that with heavier objects like slippers or one of my Rockport shoes, which must weigh almost as much as he does. Lately, he's not content with just raising it in the air - he's using his back legs for power and now when he pulls things up, he stands straight up in the air as tall as he can reach (that's when you know he's having a good time). Unfortunately, especially if he's really over-exuberant, when he stands straight up he doesn't take into account the direction he's pulling or the weight he's lifting. He often falls over backwards, landing either on his butt (which he did last night for the first time and sent screams of laughter from me and Carol) or landing flat on his back. Once he landed flat on his back on the marble hearth in front of the fireplace and I think he hit his head because he looked like he got stunned and had to rest and get his bearings before he traipsed off somewhere else.

It took a while to get Indy & Chip to be together, but now they are absolutely inseparable. They are constantly together, laying next to each other, snoozing, or awake and constantly grooming each other.

Unfortunately, this has become a downside - as the rabbits bonded, they didn't interact with their human "parents" the same way. Indy, when she was alone, always looked for me and begged for "lovin's" (which is just petting, but she just loved it). Now, she gets constant attention from Chip, so Indy doesn't look up to us as much. Chip started to bond with us when he was little and before he "matured" and got interested in Indy. Now, we're constantly trying to make sure Chip understands who we are and even though we try to show our affection to him, he's not all that interested.
We do this by picking him up - something that he allowed us to do since we first saw him at the State Fair. (Indy flat out refuses to be held - that's not her thing and she'll scratch and even bite to get away). Chip allows me to hold him in my arms with him on his back and I can stroke his head and tummy and he seems to really enjoy it. He just doesn't like to be picked-up and grunts and growls sometimes when you try. He quiets down in your arms, though.

He's been great. Having two rabbits has been great - I really think having a younger bunny in the house has been good for Indy, keeping her active. We've had some great times.

I need to get a Chip webpage up and running on this website... maybe someday I'll get some time... and sorry for a lack of pictures lately - I'm having some very odd performance problems with my computer dealing with large files and Windows Explorer that I need to solve quickly...

When morning came around, Chip wasn't any different. We both went to work. Carol called the vet - no openings this morning, but she could just show-up and they'll treat it like an emergency, wedging her in between appointments.

Carol left work and went home.

Chip is up and alert. Carol opened the cage and the two of them just came out and ran around the family room, jumping up in the air and just having a wonderful time.

Damn rabbit - he's not sick at all!

Now what was it? We don't know. the vet thinks it was a "gas bubble" that can be pretty painful.

All we know is Carol lost time at work and the little Chipster is fine.

There, on the stairs, I can see where a certain older female bunny has satisfied her urge to chew by chewing on the fresh paint on the outside corner of the wall! I guess we setup the gates a bit too late.

Time to break out some touch-up paint!!!