Rabbit Rehab

I’ve owned one rabbit before the current bunny saga. His name was Remington, and he was a noble rabbit. Without him, I never would have developed my love for the lapin. Growing up a farmer’s daughter, rabbits were our mortal enemies. We shot and sometimes ate them. I wondered why people would have them as pets when they could have dogs or cats. I mean, it’s not like they even do anything. They don’t make noises. They don’t wag their tails. Why not have a fish really? Remington’s rambunctious nature changed all that. His favourite food was tomato sauce.

Now we have two rabbits: Wellesley and Newton, father and son. The mother left (oh Elliot, where are you now?) and Wellesley raised a little tribe of bunnies single pawedly. He did a pretty good job too. We gave away the other bunnies, and kept Newton as a companion rabbit even though I know you aren’t supposed to have two boys together…. So far they had gotten along very well. They slept together all cuddled up in a cute rabbity ball.

After a while of great father son happy times, it became apparent that Newton needed neutering. He started humping his dad. Animals don’t care so much about the familial relationships they share with who they hump, rabbits especially. Wellesley tried to hump my elbow once. Anyway, initially Newton’s humping seemed ok. Wellesley would just run away. At that point I couldn’t afford to neuter Newton. Rabbit neutering is not cheap. It’s around $125 - $160 (we neutered Wellesley after he became a dad). After a while it became apparent that it was causing Wellesley some serious stress, so Murray helped me out and we got Newton neutered.

Rabbits don’t always recover well from surgery. They have to be separated from other rabbits for almost two weeks. The reintroduction didn’t go so well after the two week break. Wellesley had gotten used to the freedom of not being humped, and Newton had residual hormones and was rabbit wild horny. So Newton chased Wellesley, and Wellesley was terrified of Newton. We tried to make them live together, but it was just too cruel (Wellesley had even escaped a few times) so we separated them.

We have tried on multiple occasions to get them back together, particularly because for a while there we had one rabbit in the house (Wellesley) and one rabbit outside (Newton). We tried getting them back together in different environs. We tried the bathroom (too small), the outside hutch (Wellesley was too good at escaping), the bedroom (most epic rabbit battle of all time, mid air flying rabbit kick collisions). Murray didn’t like living with a rabbit in the bathroom. I promised we’d get them both outside, but it was hard because I broke my ankle and couldn’t even get into the rabbit enclosure. In the end, we rangied up a divider on the inside of our enclosure – converted an old washing basket into a second rabbit house, and wa la! We had a rabbit shanty town.

The fence in the middle was mesh. We wanted them to be able to see each other so they could get used to each other again. It was a very simple plan. We did have to make some adjustments to the initial design - Newton dug under the first separating fence and Wellesley escaped again. Murray did the hard yards (my ankle was still moon booted) and dug under the entire enclosure and put mesh down as recommended by Ngaio’s boyfriend Nick, who used to build zoo enclosures. This worked well. We had both bunnies outside, contained in their respective sides of rabbit shanty town. We’ve only had one rabbit escape since then, and that’s because the lawnmower man cut a hole in the mesh with his lawn edger (nice one!)

In the last few weeks I started noticing the bunnies sniffing each other through the fence. Then the other day I noticed them laying out in the sun next to each other. After having a serious clean out of Wellesley’s side, and terrifying the rabbits by giving them each a bit of a brush, we thought we’d try putting them together again.

We hoped Wellesley’s preoccupation with changes to his surroundings might distract him (he likes his grass just so). And Newton was stressed because we’d just terrorised him with a brush, so we thought he’d be less likely to dominate Wellesley. So we put Newton over the fence into Wellesley’s side. There was silence, no stomping. This was the first time this had happened. Both rabbits start stomping to signify danger whenever they even THINK the other rabbit is around. Newton and Wellesley were both so preoccupied with the ‘new’ space, that they didn’t pay much attention to each other at all. I watched them for a full hour, ready to intervene at the hint of any rabbit shenanigans but there were none. I left them to it for a bit. When Wellesley is really distressed he tries to jump up into my arms. I went out and put my arms out to him, he didn’t even look at me. We left them alone together for the night. When I woke up around 6am I peeked out the window and they were snuggled up together on top of the hutch.

At the moment, we haven’t taken down the middle fence. We are giving it time so that Newton’s space can become more neutral before we reintroduce them to it. There have definitely been a couple of dominance kerfuffles, but nothing major and both rabbits seem happy. Newton has started doing his head twitch jumpy move that we haven’t seen him do in ages. And Wellesley is back to playing dad, and cleaning his son. We are so happy to have finally facilitated this successful rabbit rehab.

On getting sick and taking time off work

I hate calling in sick to work. When I worked for bigger companies in the past it wasn’t such a big deal – someone could replace you. But my last two jobs have been for smaller, family businesses (which I prefer) and it usually puts pressure on somewhere if you’re not at work. I know that before I call in sick I need to call all our part time staff (there are two) and check if they can work.Often if they can’t, I will just go into work. And strangely, half the time once I get there I’m ok.

I really struggle to know the difference between take-a-panadol-and-toughen-up sick and you-might-infect-millions-of-people-with-heinous-disease sick. It’s especially important that I know these things because I work directly with food all day. I know that if my skin starts aching, I shouldn’t be at work, but up until that point I find it really hard to tell. Do I think I’m sick because I’m tired? Am I hung over? Is it just because it’s raining? Do I actually just not feel like going to work today? Am I actually sick?

I’m not an idiot. I understand basic first aid and medicine. I know how to check my temperature and glands, and I usually know when I need to see a doctor. But I also have a body that doesn’t act like ‘normal’ bodies do. I suffer from IBS, which can cause severe pain, cramping and often leaves me in a constant state of too much poo, or no poo. I find I need to sleep more than some people (at least eight hours a night), otherwise I get run down and my brain stops functioning. I have these funny glands in my throat that puff up like a frog when I get just the hint of a bug. I also start coughing up blood just if I’ve been coughing a lot. I generally bruise/bleed/scar/rash more easily than most. I also have something wrong with my Eustachian tubes so I have constant post nasal drip and if I vomit it comes out of my mouth and nose (not really a problem, just something to add to the increasing weird and gross list of Hannah). And I could go on (this is a really fun list, I don’t care if I sound like a whiny, hypochondriac bitch!) Although none of these are major, it can make diagnosing a genuine ‘sick’ day a bit tricky.

So today I didn’t go to work. I validated my sick day by having my husband say ‘You look like shit’ this morning and the fact that I knew our part time staff member could cover me. I felt pretty bad about it because I had just had a four day holiday weekend. It doesn’t matter. I now know (at just after finishing time) that I did need today off. I do have a temperature, and an unattractive, hacking cough. All I managed today was catching up on New Zealand’s Next Top Model, and a little online political banter. I did fold some washing, but needed a nap afterwards.Not sick enough to require a trip to the doctors, but definitely not well enough to be at work.

I really hope I'm not feeling sick again tomorrow. And I really hope it isn’t raining…

On having a bach

When I say to people ‘I have a bach’, I feel like I sound like a rich person. Usually people who have bach’s are in a financially stable position. Once you’ve got your house, you’ve paid the mortgage down a bit, you get a boat and then you go ‘I think we might need a bach’. That’s not how our family came to have a bach.

After a couple of robberies in the family home in Longburn road, Henderson, my Grandparents (with help) decided to move out of the big smoke and out to the country. They bought a section in Whakapirau with a little house on it, put some serious gardens in and really enjoyed their retirement. Whakapirau is a very isolated place on one of the many inlets of the Kaipara Harbour.The closest township is Maungaturoto. It takes us just over two hours to drive up there from our place in Pt Chev.

My grandfather passed away from cancer in 2002. With help from Hospice, we nursed him at home in Whakapirau for the last few weeks of his life. All of his children and grandchildren were there when he passed. His gravestone is in the cemetery by the little Anglican church, just up the hill from the house. It is still the newest gravestone there, and it is not like any gravestone you’ve ever seen.

Living there alone was very hard for my Grandma. Although she has good friends in Whakapirau, it is pretty far away from her family. When Grandma decided she needed to move back to Auckland to be closer to us all we understood, but we didn’t want to leave Granddad alone up there.

Ideas of forming a family trust to buy the house from Grandma were discussed and decided on. I saw some pretty fiery outbursts at some of those meetings (mostly my mum). Ideas around financing this meant compromise and a real reality check. Many ideas were floated. Not everyone in our family joined the trust – for some it wasn’t financially viable. It meant collectively paying the mortgage on the house which, although initially purchased for $60,000 was now valued at $300,000. We also had to get bank loans, so that we could renovate – the plan being that we could rent it out over Summer to help pay the mortgage. Major renovations are almost finished now.

I am the only person in my generation in the trust. I only have a half share, but I like to think it helps out. I have paid that share over the last many years regardless of my financial status. I’ve paid it when I was on the unemployment benefit, and paying it meant I had only $15 a week for food. It is (obviously) not something ever disclosed when filling out financial forms. WINZ see it as an ‘Asset’, Banks will see it as something to help solidify a mortgage. It can be neither of these things. My mum earns just over minimum wage, and has never owned a house. But she pays a full share in the family bach. For many in the trust, having the bach is not easy. There are a few who pull the lions share with renovations and work on the property. It's a lot of work. Keeping that house in the family is very important to us all.

For the last three years I’ve worked at least one day on the weekend. And Murray (my husband) has had different days off than I have. This has made it very difficult for us to go up there. Going up for a couple of days this week is the first time we’ve been able to go up and stay there properly in over two years. Logically, it doesn’t seem like much time for the investment made.

But when you’re up there, you read the ‘guest book’ we have up there and it makes you happy. So many people in our family use this bach as an oasis. It’s a halfway house between other places further North. It’s a gap between parties. It’s a rest for a mum from the kids for a bit. It’s a wharau – a temporary resting place. We spent our few days up there watching DVD’s, finding treasures in the old VHS collection like a series of MASH. We played board games. We ate junk food. I cooked fantastic, lengthy meals. We drank wine. We had a spa bath. We visited my Granddad. And we felt like very rich people.

Thoughts on us winning Best New Business 2011

I manage a little allergy foods store called The Gluten Free Grocer. On Wednesday, it won Best New Business at the Bloom Her Businesswoman's Awards in Wellington. When Sarah (my boss) called me with the news I yelled so loud my flatmate thought something was wrong and came to check on me. I know it's an award from a small NZ woman's business magazine, but it is still a major achievement for a little company like ours.

I am extremely proud of this. Our team, excluding part time staff (and Brian, our super delivery man), consists of Mitch and Sarah (the owners) and me. It is an extremely small, niche business. We have no IT department, we have no marketing department, we have no warehouse. There are just three of us who wear many hats. We've all contributed ideas, extra time, love and devotion to this business. We've all had faith in it. And we’ve done this because we see on a daily basis how much a small community needs it.

My last full time position was with a small partnership that turned into a legal nightmare within a month of my starting there. I ended up in mediation to recover money owed to me (which I won). The court battle between partners has just finished now, almost three years later. Being a very honest person, when asked why I left my previous position I told interviewers the truth. This was during the beginning of the recession. After three months of interviewing for positions equivalent to the last, I gave up and worked part time at my local video shop whilst focusing on my artistic practice. When I decided I needed to return to full time work, I knew it had to be for an ethical business. My entire criteria for work changed. It was not about how much I had earned previously, but how I could do a job that actually meant something.

What this achievement has cemented for me is that you can succeed in business without solely focusing on the bottom line. When you invest in your customers through offering help, advice and support, your customers will invest in you. I love my job. Every day I wake up and I know that I might change someone’s life just by sharing information with them, and making them feel like they are not alone. Every day I honour the ethics that were passed on to me from Grandma and Granddad. I honour my great grandmother, who won a QSM for community service. I honour my mother, who works in elderly care for little more than minimum wage. I honour our kiwi heritage of looking after your neighbors, by looking after this community.

I am saddened to watch our current government compromise New Zealand’s ethics. I watch National sell America the right to change our policy just to have a movie made here. I watch them contemplate changing Auckland’s gambling laws for the sake of a convention centre – ignoring all that many South Auckland communities have worked hard for. I watch National begin deep water drilling for oil off the Canterbury basin, with no plan in place for spillage, and watch Mr Key defend our ‘100% Pure’ slogan at the same time. We know it’s all for the sake of ‘the bottom line’.

I have difficulty believing that selling our countries ethics is the only way to reduce our mountainous deficit. I watched this clip the other day, and although they are talking about the US economy, it is very relevant to us here in NZ. It reinforced for me that the current government is not doing the best it can for us.

New Zealand has the 6^th biggest gap between our richest and poorest people. America is number 3, so we are similar in that way as well as our debt. This is not a new thing, but the current government has made changes to taxation which only broadens this gap. They have made these changes during a time of recession and soaring food and petrol prices. These changes do not only affect those in the lowest income brackets (we currently have one in six kiwi kids living under the poverty line) – but also affect the buying power of the middle classes. How can this be good for our nation’s morale or our economy?

Our government need to stop comparing and competing with other countries. I'm tired of hearing things like: 'Our highest earners tax bracket is on par with Australia'. We are not Australia. Our size and geographical location means that we cannot compete to be the cheapest, but we can be the best within our niche. Sarah and Mitch created our award winning business with almost no capital. They focused on the skills of our team and the resources available to them to create a unique environment. We cannot be the cheapest – we are a small, specialty store with minimal buying power in a small, island nation – but we can offer a friendly smile, advice, recipes and support to the community who support us.

Our government need to recognise that our nation is a niche. They need to stop compromising our unique morality we have spent lifetimes building. Instead of oil drilling, we should be focused on creating the best environmental policy in the world. If we really invested in our ‘100% Pure’ slogan, we’d see a flow on effect in our tourism industry. Our government need to start demonstrating some compassion. They need to stop demonising the poor and jobless. They need to acknowledge and unleash the power of our middle class. They need to recognise that you can create something out of nothing through consistency, honesty, patience and persistence.

Winning this award gives me a little glimmer of hope during what feels to me to be a very dark time for our country. I hope that others will see that there are many ways to define success aside from ‘the bottom line’. I hope the government will recognise that compromising our nations ethics does not look good to potential 'customers' or 'investors'. I hope the government will recognise that they need to invest in us. All of us.

Why I proudly marched in the Auckland Slutwalk

The uproar of negative response toward Slutwalk is very much an indicator that it hits on something sensitive to many. I have had a lot of people tell me: ‘I don’t really agree with the cause’, without seeming to understand what the cause was. I have had people outright tell me that I am an idiot for having anything to do with it. Before reading this, I suggest reading the information about why it started, and maybe watching some footage of the protest:

And this

A Christian take on Slutwalk:

Slutwalk has become a world-wide phenomenon because the issue it tackles is global. Rape occurs everywhere, and the stigma put on women who are raped is a world-wide problem. Slutwalk is about breaking down the myth that women are more likely to be raped when they dress ‘like sluts’, and shifting the onus from the victim to the rapist.

We are conditioned in how we think about gender and sexuality from a very early age. I can remember at around age 5 being told by my father ‘Don’t let boys touch you’. It was never put into any kind of context, and when I asked why I was just told ‘Don’t.’ From the age of 5 I knew that if a boy touched me, it was my fault because I shouldn’t have let him. My dad wasn’t being a terrible parent, he was trying to keep me safe. I’m sure this style of parenting was pretty normal. It is not easy for parents to talk to their kids about sex.

My parents never openly talked about sexuality. We were absolutely educated about sex from an early age. We read ‘Where Do We Come From?’ and knew all the basics, and we definitely knew about stranger danger. But aside from a talk about puberty, there was never any open dialogue about sexuality, desire and our bodies. I knew that my body was taboo and that it was important that I didn’t let boys touch it. I didn’t know why it was important and when I was sexually assaulted around the age of 11, I said nothing because I assumed it was my fault because I 'let' a boy touch me.

In retrospect, the problem with my not saying anything was not only that it affected me, but that it also let this boy know that this behaviour was ok. He probably knew deep down it wasn’t but there weren’t any consequences for his actions. I imagine this is not an unusual event. 90% of rape/sexual assault cases go unreported. In accepting a society where the onus of sexual assault is on the victim, we are also accepting a society where our boys think its ok to sexually violate girls.

I have been told that dressing in revealing clothing is like; ‘hold(ing) a piece of steak out in front of a hungry lion’. From reading backlash to Slutwalk in the papers, I can see this attitude is prevalent. In saying and believing this, we are saying to our boys not only that it is within their nature to rape women, but also that it is understandable that they assault women who dress or act provocatively. Those who support this notion say it is a form of rape prevention. To me this seems more like an open invitation to punish women who dress or act like ‘sluts’.

Despite this, there is no evidence to suggest that women who dress provocatively are more likely to be raped than women who dress conservatively. As my friend Lucy bluntly put it the other night ‘If that was the case, you’d be getting raped all the time’. I am not getting raped all the time. This is because rape is about power and control, vulnerability and opportunity. It is not about sex. This myth reinforces the idea that women who are comfortable, confident or proud about their sexuality should be punished. It reinforces the double standard of the ‘slut’ and the ‘stud’, which is widely accepted as an antiquated notion. This is not any kind of equality.

I have read much backlash from women from the earlier generations of feminists about this series of protests. I have read that: ‘Slutwalk has set the women’s movement back 50 years’. I always thought feminism was about gender equality and women’s rights… The problem clearly, is with the name, and the concept of claiming back the word ‘slut’. In claiming back the word ‘slut’, we are claiming back our right to exist as sexual beings. You don’t need to dress ‘slutty’ to want or understand this right. There is nothing wrong with modesty. What is wrong is for women to feel shame about their bodies and about having sexual feelings. A woman should feel comfortable as a ‘slut’ or a ‘prude’, and should not be judged for choosing to be either or anything else on the scale between. I am very sad that many women can’t see past the word ‘slut’ to the truth that we are fighting for the same cause.

One in four women and one in eight men are likely to experience sexual violence in their lifetime. That is a lot of people. Those people are people you know. Within my extended family I know of five women over a range of generations who have been raped, or sexually assaulted. Statistically, there are probably more. In every case I know of, the offender was someone they knew. It is not just people with severe mental issues that are sexually offending. Think about those statistics and then think about how many perpetrators of sexual violence you probably know. It's not a very nice thing to think about. Something has to change.

We live in a culture where sexual violence is a hidden, but common thing. To me, this is absolutely unacceptable. We need to change that culture, and we need to back it up with policy that supports victims of rape. In New Zealand around one out of one hundred rapists will serve any kind of penalty for this crime. We can change this culture by making small changes. We can change what we are teaching our children and how we think and talk about women. We can create a safe environment so that people can report their rapists without fear. We can stop saying ‘she was asking for it’, because by the very definition of rape, she wasn’t.

First post: Why write this blog?

Welcome to my blog!

I've started this as a way of (hopefully) jump starting my writing practice - which is sporadic largely due to slackness. I've attempted to write novels in the past, and have never got very far partly due to lack of discipline, but mostly due to being overly self critical. Any hint of a novel I've ever written has long ago been deleted during moments where I decided that the whole thing was absolute rubbish. Because of this, I have become a writer of poetry - shorter, and something I feel I can be flippant about. Different in my brain than a longer term project.

Through writing this blog I will be forced to immortalise thoughts that I will probably see as redundant just months after writing them. I'm hopeing this will help me to be brave enough to one day not delete things, build a full picture and then edit. I will have to live with my flaws in thought and writing, and can look back and (hopefully) see some sort of growth. I am not aiming this at anyone in particular, and if I get one follower outside of my friends and whanau, I will be extremely surprised.

Please ignore the poor design of my blog. Despite having a design degree (I majored in painting), I am mostly computer illiterate and am a little of a technophobe. I will try and make it better when my brain can wrangle it, I promise.