How to Scare Your Bunny

So we're house-sitting now, up in Bonny Doon, California. My adviser lives about 3.5 miles up a windy mountain road from the coast, in a rambling wood house at the end of a very steep driveway, set in its own grove of redwoods. There are no curtains on most of the windows because there are no human beings who could possibly see in. The water is from an aquifer under the hill across the street, with PVC pipes draining into two tanks and then getting pumped into the house through a filter. There is cable and internet, but besides that it certainly feels like a kind of Henry Miller-esque Big Sur experience. It's quiet, man. For the first time in three years, I'm somewhere quiet.

That said, it's also a pain in the ass getting there and back. Yesterday was day two of hauling our stuff up from town, this time including the bunny. I felt like a very, very bad bunny dad cruising up and around the curves with poor terrified little Pesto in the back seat, hyperventilating and obviously quite sure we were taking her somewhere to be fed to coyotes. She still hasn't gotten up the courage to explore the rest of the kitchen she's staying in, instead running back and forth from her cage to a cardboard box we gave her to hide in. In short, I gave her post-traumatic bunny syndrome.

In other news, the academic job application experience is even scarier and more awful than I anticipated, which is definitely saying something. I'll save my extended thoughts on it for a near-future post.