Bunny bonding; job search tedium; maths

Walked up to St Peter’s Avenue on the afternoon of Sunday 22nd to meet the lovely Sandra to view potential new companions for Harley. We were shown three female rabbits who were currently without companions – two, Patches and Lexie, whom Sandra had identified in advance as potentially suitable, and a third, Cherry, whom she included mainly because she’s been at the rescue centre for over two years. Ruth settled on Lexie, a largish and seemingly quite boisterous bunny, as her potential mate of preference, deciding (unfairly, I thought) that Cherry was too timid. Patches dented her chances by biting Ruth during the inspection.

I was personally rather charmed by another lone female Flopsy, a pug-faced dwarf lop with, evidently, personality issues – Sandra did try and find a few nice words to sell her to us with, but kept falling back on ‘She’s a dwarf lop’. Flopsy did indeed appear to be wearing a somewhat grumpy expression, but it could just have been the set of her face. By the time we emerged from viewing Cherry, Flopsy had turned her back on us. Poor thing. I do hope she finds an understanding mate.

Ray came round for dinner that evening, for the first time in a while, and we spent a pleasant evening in conversation, though as often happens, mainly him and Ruth in increasingly animated conversation while I chipped in occasionally. I broke up the party at around 11pm in deference to my 5.30am start, and bundled him into a taxi still clutching a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape we had been keeping as a reward for extended bunny-sitting, but which had somehow got broken into during the course of the evening.

Spent most of the following weekend preparing a presentation and other bits and pieces for another job interview, this time at the School of Oriental and African Studies as was, though it now seems to refer to itself just as SOAS, University of London. The actual interview itself was a mixed bag – presentation and first tranche of questioning went well; after that things went a bit downhill. Shoe crisis led to my wearing a none-too-comfortable pair of shoes I hadn’t worn for a while, so my feet were raw by the end of the day. Ended the day by realising I’d lost my debit card in a self-checkout machine at Euston, which said it all really.

Drove down to Abergavenny last Friday afternoon for my first viewing of Mum and Dad’s new house. There seems little way of ever making it a less than 3 hour journey from Milton Keynes, but my chosen route via back roads down to the A40, and thence on the A40 via Gloucester and Ross-on-Wye, proved particularly long-winded, not helped by snagged up Friday traffic at the A417 Air Balloon roundabout at Birdlip and around Monmouth. The journey was quite pretty though. Returning on the Sunday I chose the dull but quicker M5-M42-M40 route.

Much of Saturday and Sunday morning was spent looking after Nia while Dave and Hazel went to a wedding reception. I say “looking after” – Mum did the brunt of it, though I did contrive to push pushchairs and put DVDs in the DVD player. Was quite intrigued to see the revamped version of Postman Pat, in which Pat is no longer a mere postman but has been promoted to Head of the Special Delivery Service, and has a satnav and a mobile. Hannah and Henry called in for an hour or so in the afternoon, and we had cupcakes to celebrate Nia’s 18-month ‘birthday’ the day before.

As I write, Harley is now back home from his week away being ‘bonded’ with Lexie, together with his new ‘companion’. We had received a ‘heads up’ from Sandra during his time away to the effect that the bonding appeared to be going well, and indeed they posted this photo on Reading Rabbit Rescue’s Facebook page, together with slightly over-cutesy caption.

At the moment I have my reservations – a few days in to the new couple’s bonding, Steve and Sandra discovered that she had given Harley a bite for which he has had to go on a course of antibiotics. When I spoke to Ruth on the phone at the weekend, the two of them were apparently about as far away from each other as they could get. Time will tell if things improve.

Have recently signed up for another OU module, this time ‘Discovering Mathematics’. While not especially interested in maths for maths’ sake, I am quite interested in a couple of the statistics modules the OU offers, but as they both advise students to have a certain level of mathematics proficiency, and as I haven’t formally studied maths since taking my O-level in 1985, I thought perhaps a refresher might be the thing. Going OK so far, though I'm only a short way in to Unit 1. I have worked out how to switch on my newly-purchased scientific calculator though.

On the topic of exciting training opportunities: received a recent email from one of the several JISCMail lists I am subscribed to at work, advertising an Autumn 2013 programme of workshops, one of which was titled ‘Hands-on Augmented Reality’. ‘Augmented Reality’ probably has some technical meaning of which I am unaware, but on the surface it sounds as though it might involve magic mushrooms or similar.