We are currently in the season for outdoor decorations, and one of the more popular choices for decorating is deer.   Technically, I suppose that people are thinking ‘reindeer’, with sort of North Pole connotations.   But it’s easier to go with generic deer as a sign of the season.

If you are wanting to have outdoor lights anyway, why not a lighted deer?

This family of log deer are certainly cute and crafty, as well as being environmentally friendly.

Hey, wait a minute.   That’s not even a deer, it’s just a dog with an antler tied to his head (if you want to be a Grinch about it).

Well now we’re getting completely ridiculous, besides being rather abstract.   Nothing says festive like Rudolph the red-nosed car.   Really?

This is more like it, the real thing (although you can tell from the state of his antlers that I took this picture in the spring).   After spending the summer wherever they disappear off to, the local deer are back in the neighborhood.   And making a festive statement just by being themselves.

I think that my love of dinosaurs must have started before I could even read.   My big brother discovered the topic first, and I always tried to do everything that he did.  He made little books about his favorites (or perhaps it was just the ones that he read about.  I’m sure he liked them all).   I suspect that all children are fascinated by dinosaurs (at least before Barney came along and ruined it for the others), because they were gigantic and now they are all gone, disappeared off the face of the earth. 🙁

Leaping lizards!  I even signed the petition to keep Dippy the diplodocus in place at the Natural History Museum, but it did no good (he’s gone on tour for now and was replaced by a whale,  a mammal of all things).  The age of dinosaurs is over, I guess.  However, they still have a bit of things to entertain dinosaur lovers like myself.

Of course artists renditions of dino life are de rigeur, because we can only infer what they looked like and what they were up to.

And the newest thing to make dinos come to life are animatronic dinosaurs, like T-Rex here.   He was quite popular and scads of people took selfies with him (including me!).

These animatronic Deinonochus, a species made popular in the Jurassic Park movies, are simultaneously adorable and quite scary.

All of this makes a skeleton seem rather ordinary.   It’s hard to appreciate the time and love required to find the bones in the first place, pry the bones from solid rock in the lab, replace the missing bones with what was probably there, and assemble it together again.

Then there is this newspaper, which was delivered to my house courtesy of a local church.

While I can’t agree with a single one of their conclusions (being largely fact free), it did have some rather nice pictures of my favorite creatures. 😉

It all started with “Tales of Peter Rabbit”.    Yes the lovely story of the misadventures of this mischievous young rabbit was the start of a love affair with the family Leporidae.   And Easter is their holiday, starting with their chocolate representatives who bring us both hard boiled and candy eggs.   Who wouldn’t like such a splendid species (other than gardeners, farmers,  Australians, Elmer Fudd, etc.)

Here’s my copy of the story, it’s not actually the one I originally read, I’m sure that was a library book.    Accompanied by my porcelain rabbit that I bought when I worked in a toy store about 30 years ago.   I had a Peter Rabbit, but my last dog decided it was too tempting  a treat to go untasted.

Here’s my newest rabbit, it is a “velveteen rabbit” from the story of the same name.   It is actually some sort of plush, but that is a minor quibbling detail.   Next to it is an Indian rabbit, made out of a Pendleton blanket, I bought this at March Pow-Wow some years ago.

This bunny belonged to M, and he got it when he was a small child and first came to America, so that would make it close to 60 years old.

These are my new bunny salt and pepper shakers.   It’s not anything I needed, but they were too adorable to resist (note to self:  you must try harder to resist things).

Here is one of the actual bunnies that lives down by the mailbox.   I took this picture the other day as Miss P barked madly at her.   Today we are having a spring blizzard, so I expect that they are all snug in their rabbit holes, eating blackberries and cream like the siblings of Peter Rabbit.   Poor Peter, he had to go to bed without this treat.