Virtual Quill

It was an eventful Easter, as it always is when Rudy is involved.
It goes back to last year, when Rudy and Fiona encountered a young rabbit named Wendell Luckyfoot who was rather single-minded in his ambition to one day assume the Easter Bunny job. After that incident in which he rescued Rudy and Fiona from a very large bear, Rudy did some research and found that Wendell was actually one of Gran's many grandchildren. That's why Rudy knew how to contact Wendell's mom in September when they both met in a tattoo parlor.
This year's trouble started when Fiona (who loves cosplay) applied industrial strength rabbit pheromones as a disguise. It worked too well, attracting a pack of wolves beyond the ability of the two to defend themselves. Once again Wendell saved them, and they found themselves escaping into the Rabbit Warren.
I grew up down there, but to the uninitiated it can be surprising. Rudy and Fiona didn't know that a vast civilization exists beneath their feet. Some of the sections such as the Marketplace are the size of cathedrals.
They ran into Gran, who (finally) introduced herself to Wendell. With time running out on the egg delivery she called all of her relations including Dad and Grandpa. I'd have helped, too, if I hadn't been away here at Beige U.
More next week on the aftermath!

The process of hiring insectivores at Herd Thinners is now complete. Kell has hand-picked the staff of a division that she feels she can count on to implement her policy. What remains is a month-long orientation process, and then on May 16 they’ll go out into the field. So much is riding on them like, Kell’s whole career.
The orientation process is important because these species (shrews, spiders, bats and, yes, hedgehogs) don’t have the same feeding instincts that Herd Thinners’ traditional employees do, who grow up in groups and share the kills. Insectivores simply eat as many bugs as they can find and leave it at that. Doing so, of course, would defeat the objective of the company’s mission of selling prey.
So, they have to be taught to eat some for themselves and bring in the rest for the company to sell. This will be complicated; it’s one thing for a traditional predator to bring in half an elk, but it’s silly to expect a bug-eater to bring in half a bee. They’ll be arriving with whole insects, sometimes still alive.
Thinking about it, I suspect that the spiders will be the most effective Herd Thinners employees. Their prey will come prepackaged in silk.

Easter is only weeks away, but I’m already looking ahead to the summer. At this time last year I was going absolutely insane planning both my wedding and preparing for graduation. Looking back on all of the drama that surrounded those days I have no idea how I survived it.
Nowadays life is hardly stress-free, of course, but halfway manageable. Fenton is still taking undergraduate courses, and I’m in the process of getting my Masters in Genetics. (I’m currently seeing if it’s possible to create a flower whose pollen doesn’t cause allergic reactions. No luck so far.)
There’s another month to go in the semester, and in years past mid-May would mean a trip back to Domain for the summer. This is our home now, so when all of the students depart we’ll stay in this suddenly deserted college town with the rest of the “Townies”...a species to which we belong as well. In the immediate vicinity the inhabitants will be mainly us and the bee colony across the street.
Fenton and I will stay busy maintaining the Hare-Link servers, and one of my professors asked me to co-author a paper for a research journal. It’s the online equivalent of getting one of the top websites to link to you; a way of getting noticed.
So, I’ll be dividing my time between the lab and my domestic life at home. As long as Cassiopeia keeps her bees in line, we can handle it.

I’m having some difficulty with Tree, who is taking a dim view of my Good Neighbor policy of planting a flower garden for the bee colony to pollinate. I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that trees and flowers have a rivalry on the order of cats and dogs.
Tree is the only representative of the plant kingdom that can articulate this, but according to her it’s widespread. Trees reserve a special distaste for flowers that’s even more intense than the feelings directed at those who chop them down. That’s not logical, but prejudice never is. Tree assures me the flowers harbor similar resentments. That’s probably true, but unprovable. Daisy, our pet flower back home, doesn’t have the power of speech.
When the first of the flowers I’d planted sprouted up, Tree began dropping pine cones on them, crushing the tender shoots. I gave her a stern talking up, backed up by Fenton. Tree sulked, but the aerial bombardment ceased.
I need to remind her that this is all for the benefit of Tree’s special friend, the maple across the street. The bee colony inhabits him now, and keeping the colony happy will make life better for him and, by extension, for Tree. We’ll have to see if that logic sinks in.