Down The Rabbit Hole

Another wet yellow puddle greeted me again on Monday morning.

I was not amused.

Grumbling, I cleaned up the puddle, refilled her food dish, and rushed off to work. I couldn’t concentrate the whole day because I kept thinking about the rabbit. Is Phoebe ok? Does she seem more settled in? Is she drinking her water? Eating her pellets? Am I letting her out enough? Did she spray pee outside the cage again? All day the only thoughts running in my head were rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit. Rabbit? Rabbit! Rabbit??! RABBIT!

When I finally got home I decided to try out my friend’s remedy and rubbed some vinegar onto the spot she peed on. To be on the safe side, I placed some newspapers over the spot as well. Feeling rather smug, I went off to shower before I headed out for my movie. As I was leaving the house, I decided to check on the rabbit again.

Lo and behold, there was another puddle of pee outside the cage… IN ANOTHER SPOT. WHICH ALSO HAPPENED TO BE RIGHT OVER HER FOOD BOWL, SO SOME STAINED THE SIDES OF THE BOWL.

I was quite ready to turn Phoebe into rabbit stew. But first I complained to my friend.

Me: SHE PEED IN ANOTHER SPOT. GYAHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Friend with two rabbits: Well, you just have to keep on rubbing vinegar until she stops.
Me: Really? *pause* Wait, how long did it take you to housetrain yours?
FWTR: A few months?
Me: *collapses on floor*

Man, I REALLY hope I have the patience to see this through.

It is advisable, when you first get a pet rabbit, to let it settle into its cage for the first few hours and let it pee there. Once a rabbit chooses a spot to pee in, it will return to that spot whenever it needs to pee.

Those were the facts running inside my head on Sunday when I checked on the rabbit first thing in the morning and was greeted by the sight of viscous, yellow fluid puddling on the floor right outside of the cage.

Why was the rabbit peeing outside her cage? How the hell did she even manage do that when she was inside the cage?!

“Male rabbits do that,” said a friend with two pet rabbits. “They tend to spray their pee outside the cage.”

Yeah, but Phoebe is female?

“Well, females do it too. Although most of the time it’s due to missing the mark.”

Ah.

“You can stop them from peeing on that spot by wiping some vinegar over it.”

Hmm.

I wiped the pee off the floor, stared at it, and observed the rabbit for the rest of the day. She didn’t seem to spray over the cage again, so I let her be. She was getting more well behaved as well, as I let her out again and she hopped back into her cage without me having to attempt getting her in. Yay, progress!

Hello! Meet Phoebe, the one year old albino rabbit Significant Other and I decided to adopt to save it from potential doom.

We just picked her up yesterday, and settled her into her new home on my porch. It is important to note that Significant Other and I had no prior experience with rabbits, so what “settled in” really means here is that we spent yesterday (and today) exhausted from stressing out over whether she was ok or not in her new home.

Our first impression when we saw her was simply WOAH, SHE’S HUGE (but totally adorable. Also, she is a white rabbit XD). After we got her to my house, we went out to buy her the necessities – a cage, food, some hay, and a water bottle – and placed her into her cage. I lined the tray with newspaper to prepare for what I was sure would be a bombardment of rabbit poop and pee.

After awhile we decided that maybe we should let the rabbit run around the porch a bit, as it had been stuck in a car and a styrofoam box for more than an hour. This turned out to be a mistake. Once the rabbit was out, it simply refused to go back into the cage. Every time we got near her, she ran away from us. Every time we managed to get close enough to her to pick her up, she panicked the moment we touched her. In frustration we called the girl who gave her to us to ask for help. She advised us not to let the rabbit out yet as it needed to get used to its new living space first… which was a bit too late. Whoops. Could she offer any advice on getting the rabbit back into the cage? Besides picking her up and putting her back in, nope.

So Significant Other and I spent the better part an hour trying to coax Phoebe back into her cage. Significant Other finally managed to grab ahold of her in a manner which she didn’t struggle… then she struggled the moment he reached her cage and scratched him -_- I was getting tired from trying as well, and it didn’t help that I had a dinner to go to in 15 mins. In the end Significant Other managed to grab hold of the rabbit again and bring her to the cage. She struggled again, hopping free of his arms… right into her cage! We shut the door before she could run out again. Phew. Significant Other quickly declared himself to be a champion rabbit tamer. I decided not to argue out of sheer exhaustion of chasing after the rabbit.

Well, of course I would rather jump into something less hazardous, but I’m getting really desperate here. And not to mention depressed. God knows how long more I can keep this up before I snap. Or go insane. Wait, maybe I already am insane.

Two days ago, I dreamt of insects. Yesterday night I dreamt of circles. I dreamt of things going around in circles, of circular shapes in every direction I look.

I related it to the same friend who interpreted my dream yesterday, and he told me that the circles represent infinity, going around in a loop without end, a monotonous existence… in other words, I’m stressed. Crap.

There was a museum, in a mall. They were holding an exhibit about insects, and I decided to explore it, along with a few other people. It did not turn out the way we expected it to be. I remember a huge mound of maggots on the floor behind us, threatening to engulf us. Streams of cockroaches scuttled all across the floor around us. We ran further into the museum to escape. Its path was like a maze. One of the “exhibitors” unleased two giant bees from one of the rooms we ran past. Strangely they did not bother us, although they were frightening. After some harrowing turns following the signs in the museum, we managed to escape to the carpark.

And I woke up.

When I related my nightmare to a friend, he pointed out that it fitted the description of my current office.

“It’s telling you how you feel about work,” he explained, and he recounted to me the numerous things I told him before about the place. And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), the pieces clicked.

Hmm, maybe it’s time I put my escape plan into action?

For quite awhile now I’ve had to deal with a certain someone whose behaviour towards me, and other people, I cannot stand. Well, ok, other people can’t stand it either. On more than one occasion I have called her a total and utter bitch behind her back. But I do try to be fair to people, if someone annoys or infuriates me in a certain way, maybe it’s because I don’t like that certain aspect in people. Or maybe I’m having a bad day and was already irritable. Maybe s/he is actually a really nice person and I’m just being real mean.

The argument I usually phrase to myself (and other people whom I bitch about said person to) goes like this: “You know, she is a nice person, but…” And then today I realized that I could use that line to excuse just about anyone’s behaviour. “Jacob’s a really nice person, you know, except for that time he raped and murdered that poor 8 year old kid, gosh, something must have gotten into him!”

Enough is enough. It’s about time I learn to call a bitch a bitch and stop giving excuses for other people’s behaviour.

It was a few months ago when madhatter and I were discussing about redesigning our main site that I looked through my own blog template and realized how old, ugly, and in dire need of changing it was. It was horribly dated, and the more I look at it, the more horrified and embarassed I was at how bad it was, and how I knew that I could do a lot better. Then procrastination set in and I sat around mulling how to redesign my blog template for a couple of months.

Few days ago I finally set myself down at my computer, determined to at least start working on a new template. Since I had been very interested in typography lately, I decided that the best way to start was by going to dafont.com to pick out an interesting typeface and see where that would take me.

It was a very interesting journey, as I ended up making a template that I felt was very much unlike my personal self. This isn’t to say that it was bad. I actually really like it, even if it feels a little at odds with my personality. Surprisingly a lot of the elements of the current template also made its way into the new one, and it gelled together really nicely.

Now all I need to do is to code in the changes and make the new template come to life! Well, um, hopefully I’ll get to that soon-ish. Until then I’ve only got this header to show XD

Over the last few months, Significant Other and I have been spending months hunting for a house both of us want to live in. Both of us had no prior experience to this, so we went in with eyes wide open. No one warned us that we would have our asses handed to us by real estate agents.

Our house hunting nightmare started with us looking through the classified sections for places for sale that we were interested in, and calling the real estate agents in charge. Sounds simple enough? That’s what we thought until none of them called us back about our inquiries. We actually had to call them back to ask if they had any news, to which most of them would reply with oh, we haven’t checked yet, we’ll call you when we do. And then they never call back. Or we’d call them again but they’d just refuse to pick up the phone. Really, you’d think that with the state of the economy they’d be dying to make a sale.

Every now and then we’d get a real estate agent who would make a date with us to view a place, but once we were done with the viewing and asked for additional info they never got back to us.

Really, it was very irritating.

Some time later, we finally managed to meet ONE agent who actually called back when we made an inquiry about a particular place we were interested in buying. Significant Other and I fell in love with the condo unit, and wanted to buy it. He requested for an unit with two parking lots, and she showed us one. We were sold on the place, and decided to book the unit.

And then we discovered that she was trying to con us.

The day Significant Other was supposed to sign the booking agreement, the agent was late. By fifty minutes. And then she tried to make Significant Other sign the agreement in the car, which he declined because he obviously wanted to read the contract. Thankfully he did, because it stated that we were only supposed to have one parking lot. Not two.

When Significant Other pointed that out to her, she tried to cover it up by stating that “by lot no.29, they actually mean there’s lot 29 and lot 29B.” WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT IS THAT??!

So obviously the contract never got signed. She called him back for days afterwards trying to get him to change his mind, or perhaps look at another unit. Significant Other stopped picking up her calls. BTW, if you are reading this post and you happen to be that particular agent, PLEASE GO DIE IN A FIRE.

Shortly afterwards we contacted yet another real estate agent (the only reliable real estate agent we managed to get ahold of, I think mostly because she was recommended by a friend *rolls eyes*). We had contacted her much earlier about some townhouses in Hartamas, which were nice, but too expensive. She had mentioned at one point that we had a colleague handling the condo we liked, so she and her colleague showed us another unit. With two parking lots, guranteed.

We immediately decided to book it.

That finally brought us to the end of our nightmare. Although, judging by the way our agents argued tirelessly with the unit owner’s real estate agent to let us book the place instead of holding out for a better offer, it seems like there are many unpleasant twists and turns out to surprise the uninitiated home buyer.

Next time, I guess we should just buy a property straight from the fucking developers. Hopefully THAT’S easier than navigating this stupid minefield.

Ee Laine: my stomach really hurts
whiterabbit: ouch. something you ate?
Ee Laine: i dunno. it’s been days already and the pain’s on and off
whiterabbit: maybe you should go see the doctor?
Ee Laine: it’s too expensive
whiterabbit:
whiterabbit: don’t worry baybeh. i’ll be all the medicine you need
Ee Laine: ok now my stomach hurts even more now
whiterabbit: i’m sorry i just HAD to say that XD