Non-gaming Hobbies

I admitted that about 5 years ago when I realised that the aches and pains and fatigue weren't going to go away.

who are you again? what's this place? why is there a 6' rabbit in my garden?

I take it the recurring rabbit comments are from an ancient in-joke. Well, here is a new rabbit story. It is a true story of me and a rabbit.

When I was about 12 (oso many years ago) our family had two pet rabbits which we let run and hop around in the house. Like any pet, they came to think that they sort of ran the place and we were just there to feed them. Now the problem was, as I saw it, that these rabbits were getting lazy. Instead of actually running or hopping, they would just sort of lurch along like big fat, furry worms. Their feet didn't ever seem to even leave the ground. Just lurch, slide, lurch, slide.

So I, in my youth and infinite wisdom, decided I would see if I could teach the rabbits to hop. One day I noticed the female (yeah, one male, one female, and that is another story) making its way out of the hall and into the living room just as I was leaving the living room. I thought, let's see if I can get this rabbit to hop! As she was about to shuffle around the door jamb into the living room, I put my foot down right in front of her with the toes of my sneakers touching the jamb. I figured she might hop, or at least crawl, over my foot, rather than making the effort of going around it.

Anyway, she stopped, stock still for an instant, looked at my foot, then tilted her head back and looked me right in the eyes. "Go ahead, hop," I thought. She looked at my foot again, then very slowly, very carefully, leaned her head forward and grabbed hold of my big toe (through my shoe) with her teeth. Then she very smoothly and effortlessly lifted my foot up, moved her head a bit to the side, and put my foot back down again. Now, if you ever get your toe in a rabbit's mouth, you'll quickly realize that you're not going to argue about where the rabbit wants to move your foot to. Trust me, I didn't resist.

Once my foot was down, a few inches to the side, she then did her usual lazy shuffle on into the living room. And that, my friends, was my one and only effort at teaching a rabbit to hop.

believe it or not Hoppity actually built himself a new machine that (on the face of it anyway) looks rather impressive. build quality isn't as good as mine of course, but then I'm a genius and besides his paws aren't designed for intricate work, more digging holes in the ground. unf despite all that effort and expense he's planning on ruining it with that Vista virus, just so he can play the handful of games that will utilise DirectX10. And he hasn't prepared himself for the plethora of security and administrative permissions problems that using third-party s/w on Schmista brings about! To get past all that you end up turning off DEP and UAC and (in effect) end up back with XP in a skirt. Might as well just use a slipstreamed XP Vista-theme disk, apart from that DX10 which I'm not at all convinced about yet - far from it.

Perry - good rabbit story! I like the ones where they all die from mixedupmeetoesees best.