Ohio Holiday and Candy

DH is from Ohio so we spent our holiday with family there. I loved the abundance of evergreens. It was like every yard was a finely arranged Christmas tree lot. Once I see that in writing, it does not sound so nice, but it WAS beautiful...so beautiful that I actually forgot to take any pictures! What a shame.  I fell in love with a nearby quaint little town named Canal Winchester.  Even the boarded up old buildings looked precious. I don't know how they did it.

Anyhow, I got super lucky and was able to spend a couple of hours with English Angora breeder, Candy Haenszel.  Thank you, thank you, thank you! She was generous enough to let me visit with her and her rabbits.  We had a very nice conversation about angora rabbit wool and body type, genetics, fiber and rabbit raising best practices.  I originally contacted her because I was interested in her genetics booklet.  I picked up one while I was there and read it a number of times on the way home. Good, solid genetic stuff for Angora, and other, rabbit folks.  I particularly liked the section on gene linkage and also the handy chart that sorted out what all the breeds call different colors.  I found all those different color names so confusing when I was looking for my mystery kit...which by the way, might actually be a lilac pearl.  Geez...Just when I thought that problem was solved, I am reminded that those little shaded ones are tricky. Candy suggested waiting a bit more and reexamine the eye color...just to be sure.
Blue/gray = lilac pearl and brown = chocolate pearl.      
Here is Candy's website:  http://nexgenaccess.com/~cdh/ and yes, everything at Candy's is just as beautiful as it looks on her Web site.

Also, I just want to give a BIG THANK YOU to my son (and my eldest daughter as backup) for taking great care of all my rabbits when we were gone these 13 days. Good help is hard to find in the rabbit world. He had never watched rabbits before, nor even cared for them.  He was patient with my clipboard with miles of notes about each rabbit and annoying almost daily check-in phone calls.

AND even though my daughter prank-called me to say that my son had not been to my house in three days because she thought it would be the most hilarious thing ever....AND even though my son took pictures of himself holding the kits up like they were lunch, I appreciate them both.  My kids are rascally.  The apple...uh,  rabbit, doesn't fall far from the tree.