The house is quiet tonight, and bed is going to feel pretty good after two solid days of scraping and painting the back patio (which is going to look great when done, but right now is a mess of tarps, tape, paint cans, and painting implements of every kind you can think of). And the quiet is nice, because this promises to be quite the interesting week.

On Thursday, I’ll be traveling to San Francisco in preparation for a Friday get-together with John Blakeley, guitarist for The Sandals, to hopefully bring my “Great 2010 Endless Summer Poster Treasure Hunt” to a close. I’m really looking forward to meeting John, from our two phone conversations thus far he seems like a great guy. It’s not every day you get the chnace to meet one of your guitar heroes.

Sometime next week we’ll be introducing a new rabbit into our household to try some “Bunny Speed Dating” for Geronimo, who has really seemed lonely the past couple of weeks. When we lost Ginger, his bonded companion, back in September, he didn’t really seem to take it that hard, but we’ve noticed over the past week or so that he seems kind of bored and lonely.

A week ago I went up to The Bunny Basics, a rabbit rescue in Scottsdale, to scout potential suitors fro,m among the 120+ rabbits they’re presently hosting. How do you pick a new mate for Geronimo from so many rabbits? Well, first of all, I was looking for a female, as, while you can bond two males together, you have to start with a personality that would accept a male bunny as a mate, and Geronimo doesn’t have that kind of personality. And personalities have a lot to do with it – I wouldn’t call Geronimo an aggressive rabbit, but he is assertive, and so the female bunny would have to have a bit of a laid-back, easygoing personality – no divas please!

After comparing notes with Kelly, who runs the shelter and knows all the rabbits and their personalities by heart, we chose a brown lop named Butterscotch. She’s been in a holding pen with four other females ever since she and 100 other rabbits were emergency rescued from a lady’s backyard back in July, and she more than her other pen-mates seemed to go out of her way to want their company. So you have one lonely rabbit in need of a mate, and another who loves other rabbits company. What could go wrong?

Plenty, which is why we’ll be moving Geronimo out of his pen and into “neutral ground” (my office and prayer area) where he will start from scratch with a new cage area placed right next to Butterscotch’s. His area will be outfitted with new blankets and a new litter pan – the only thing he’ll keep from his old area will be his food and water dish. The goal is to have them in separate but adjacent cage areas for a few days so they can get used to each other’s scent and personality without the baggage of Geronimo protecting his territory. Then, we’ll start “chaperoned dating” – 20 minutes a day with full access to each other. If they play nice, we’ll gradually increase their time together until the day they can be moved back into Geronimo’s old area, not outfitted with the bonded pair’s stuff. Will it work? We’ll see. You can be sure Goodboys Nation weblog will have all the daily updates.