Here are a couple more pictures from the marathon. They were taken by Alex's friend Daiva that we saw along the route. This was about mile ten.
Unfortunately, there was not a single picture of us getting close to or crossing the finish line, for which I was sorely disappointed. It is always fun to see how pained your expression looks at that point. Alas.
The mystery of who was killing baby rabbits was solved. I caught a possum nearly red handed late one Friday night when I had just finished making an enormous cake. The cake is irrelevant except for the fact that it explains why I was out feeding the rabbits at 10 pm. Alex of course had the good sense to be gone that night or I would have made him take care of it. I had a head light on and as I walked into the enclosure where the chickens roam and right next to the rabbits, I saw a possum in the very act of climbing down into the pen from the chainlink fence. I had never seen a possum face to face. I knocked it back out of the rabbit pen with my water pitcher. I hit it hard enough I expected to unseat it from the fence but instead it stood there looking at me. We stared at each other for a good two minutes while I considered my options. Unfortunately, there was too much adrenaline in my system to think clearly and I even considered grabbing it by the tail and throwing it into the open rabbit cage that was nearby. Fortunately, my cerebral cortex was functioning well enough to realize that was a bad idea. I finally decided to grab the pet crate we had on the porch and a garbage can lid and try to scoop it into the crate. Which would have been great but possums have very good hanger onners and there was no way I was scooping that possum anywhere. Eventually the possum waddled off to where I couldn't reach it and then ran off (why it had stuck around that long, I have no idea). We don't know if I scared it off permanently or if it has visited our pen again. We took out the one wooden box where the rabbits were seeming to be trapped. We haven't had any losses that we know of since then.
Here is a picture of possums if you don't know what one looks like (Ed).
I admit these possums are kind of cute.
I want to clarify that the possum I saw was NOT CUTE. In fact I think it was pregnant. I didn't palpate it but it had a humongous abdomen.
Update: Alex informed me that possums are technically a different group of Australian marsupial species and while everyone here calls the animals here "possums", they are actually "opossums". Wikipedia has all sorts of fun information about opossums, including a creepy picture of one hiding in a piano.
