So , it would seem that had herself a little case of painful gas pressure, and she's breathing a geological sigh of relief now. Better light a match, Portland!
I remember the 1980 eruption. In our southern Oregon town, the cars and houses were dusted in fine gray ash, which we scraped into piles and shook into little containers for keepsakes. I don't know where mine went, but I'm sure that my souvenir-loving Uncle Frank still has the vial we sent him, tucked away in his tiny English house somewhere between the thunderegg from Crater Lake and the plastic yard-o-beverage stein from Red Lobster.
So Wee and I have come up with a theme for decorating our Halloween party (which is on October 30th - and for those to whom this means anything, we're not conflicting with the Brotherhood's gig this year).
Wee doesn't want me to advertise specifics, in case the results are lamer than hoped. Still, I think it'll be cool - I wanted to do something different from last year but was uninspired about how to go about it; now that we've picked a motif, though, I have all kinds of good ideas. It's just a question of whether we'll have the motivation and/or means to do it all. Let's just say there's some papier-mache and minor construction involved. Could be messy.
So, if you know us, and you are (or can arrange to be) in San Diego on Halloween weekend, we hope you'll come on over! The Evite will be mailed this weekend - inevitably, though, we'll omit someone by accident or because we don't have current contact info - so if you read this and think to yourself, "Why didn't those bitches invite me?", please email me, because I'm betting we actually do want your ass there too...
(By the way, the few of you who are clued in to the decor... Zip it!)
So I found a way to console myself over the Fievel thing... I went out and procured myself a couple of baby girl rats. =)
Wee had been warned that the day was coming - I'd already been cruising the "fancy rat club" sites and plotting my acquisition; Fievel was just the kicker... An omen, if you will, that it was time to get myself some rodent pals. On Monday evening I had to visit the neighborhood Postal Annex to get an online traffic school test notarized (don't ask), and lo and behold, two doors down - the Penasquitos Pet Center! Fate took its course, and 20 minutes later I was walking out of PPC with a big-ass cage and two tiny furry pals.
I tried giving them girly names like 'Morgan' and 'Stella', but they just weren't sticking; right now I'm thinking they're going to be called Bee (she likes to be up high, and has a gray-brown splotch on her face that looks like a lower-case "b" - the rest of her is white), and Tilde (she has a white " ~ " blaze on her gray-brown head; the rest is white with gray-brown speckles). I'll post pictures soon.
Lordy, they're JUST. SO. DAMNED. CUTE. They were a little freaked at first and, understandably, not feeling too social; but I've been bribing them with wee bits of pasta, which seems to be warming their hearts (or at least stomachs) toward me. Eating pasta super-charges them, for some reason - they zip around the cage afterward like tweakers with OCD. Run! Clean! Climb! Clean! Run some more! Their cage has three-count-em-three stories; Bee digs hanging out on the top level, but Tilde prefers keeping it on the down-low in the big cardboard mailing tube at floor level. Bee was sleeping up above last night, which made me a little sad for Tilde since she really likes curling up with Bee to sleep, but by morning I saw that Bee had come down and tucked into the tube with her sister again.
Indy is mostly indifferent, rather surprisingly; I think that as long as I don't actively provoke her, like triggering her chase instinct by letting them run on the floor, she'll be cool...
Anyway, there's probably nothing more boring than someone talking about their pets, but I'm pretty damned tickled with them.
So Wee and I have had traps set up all through the house to kill the mice that live in our walls. They pepper our garage and the under-sink kitchen cabinet with poop. We hear them skittering around in the walls at night. One of them had the gall to chew through our cable TV line. We are most definitely not fans of the undomesticated rodent. So, what would logic dictate that we would surely do when we found a baby version of one in the backyard? Guesses, anyone?
I was watering the plants in back Wednesday night when I noticed a small dark shape wobbling across the concrete pad by the door. I peered at it; in the dim evening light, I only could tell it was a small mammal of some sort, and it wasn't so much crawling as lurching... listing and shaking like Keith Richards at a Mormon weekend retreat. I was kind of freaked out by it, so I called Bill down to examine it. I flipped on the porch light. "What is it?"
"I think it's a baby mouse or something," he said, crouching down to get a better look.
"Why's it all shaky? Is it sick? Is it rabid?"
"No," he said, and scooped it up, which made me cringe. He held it up. "Look. It's just a baby." He started picking dog hair and soil off its nose, and we saw that its eyes were still fused shut. Up close, it didn't look mangy or sick or hurt; just blind and tired and helpless. It was definitely bigger than a mouse baby.
"So... What do you want to do with it?" I was still uncertain. After all, weren't we anti-wild-rodent on principle? But yet... He was just a little guy, all lost and sad. He couldn't help being born a varmint.
"Well..." Bill said, much to my surprise, "We could try keeping it." (OK, so I must say that the sight of my husband standing there with a wee furry guy in his hand, suggesting we could rescue it, sort of made me get a crush on him all over again.)
I had a pet rat in college, named Merlin. Merlin was smart, clean, clever, and a great companion. She has a place of honor in my Pet Hall of Fame exceeded only by Indy. I thought about her as I looked at the mystery pup, whom by that time Bill had convinced me wasn't carrying plague and had deposited into my hand. He had huge sealed-shut eyes, a weird, turned up snout and back feet that were so long that we later speculated as to whether he might be something exotic, like a kangaroo rat. He'd stopped shaking and was napped out, comforted by the warmth of my skin. Well, shit.
So we brought him in, and I made a nest for him out of paper towels and a sock in a small pet cage I had. I found a dropper and tried giving him milk. We named him Fievel, after the lost mouse in "An American Tail". Bill put him in his office for the night, the warmest room in the house. I began Googling "raising orphaned rodents", and learned how I was supposed to feed him baby formula, and give him little massages after feeding to simulate the mother licking him and keep his insides working, and wipe his privates to make him go (yeah, I know, blech... but for the record, and to my somewhat scientific interest, it worked).
In the morning, I stopped at Von's and bought some Enfamil, and took him to work so I could feed him every couple of hours. (Luckily, the boss was on jury duty.) I put his cage on top of my monitor, and he gravitated toward the warmest parts. By the end of the day, he'd gained strength and would open his mouth wide when I busted out the dropper, then laid contentedly in my hand while I gently rubbed his fur with the damp corner of a napkin. After I brought him home for the evening, one of his eyes winked open for the first time, and the other soon followed. He squinted up at us and twitched his nose, and seemed happier in our hands than in the cage, even though I'd bought him a furry mouse toy to snuggle with.
During the day, both Bill and I had poked around on the Web to try to figure out what kind of rodent he was. Kangaroo rat, Bill was convinced. I thought it was possible, except that he didn't have a tuft of fur on the tip of his tail like they did. I looked up different types of rodents. I kept looking, until finally I came to a page about "roof rats".
There are two major types of common rats. Norway rats are the type from which domesticated or "fancy" pet rats descend; they're softer, slower, more burrowers than jumpers. The other type, roof rats, are their trashy cousins - the ones that carry plague, over-run ships, prowl the sewers of cities and infiltrate people's garbage cans and pet food supplies. Their snouts are pointier, their tails and feet longer, they're faster and more limber than pet rats. They are tricky to domesticate. I saw a picture of their pups, and realized Fievel was most likely not a kangaroo rat, but a roof rat. We'd seen his bigger counterparts in our outside trash before, and one had even lived in the garage for a while.
The question was, did that change my mind about saving him? Did I want to try to raise and domesticate a pest - a critter whose brethren people made careers out of exterminating? Other people who'd tried to domesticate them were lukewarm about the results. A roof rat will never be as comfortable around people as a Norway rat will, they warned - although one raised by hand might bond with the person who raised it. I thought about what he'd look like when he got big - stocky, dark, vaguely oily. Would he escape and terrorize the house, a Templeton singing "Downstairs is a veritable smorgasbord-orgasbord-orgasbord, after the lights go down!" ? Would he gross me out?
I realized, though, that in the day I'd spent coddling him, watching him nap with his wee feet curled up, that I was stuck; I was already attached to the little bastard. So I'd keep up with the rescue effort and see how it went; worst case, Bill and I agreed, was that if once he older he became too obnoxious or impractical to keep, we'd find a likely field somewhere and release him. He was born to be wild anyway, and at least we'd have given him a chance.
That night I noticed a clicking sound when he breathed. I'd read that hand-fed babies often inhaled formula and could get it in their lungs, and the clicking sound could be a sign of congestion or pneumonia. His mouth was working when he did it, though, so I thought it could just be his white stubs of teeth rubbing together... Maybe he was teething?
We left him in Bill's office again Thursday night, and in the morning I warmed some formula and went up to feed him. He didn't move when I bumped the cage, and when I lifted him out he was sluggish. His breathing came in labored spasms. His eyes were partly open - his very first glimpse of the world by day - but they weren't bright. I tried to offer him milk, but he wouldn't eat. His legs twitched sharply. Obviously he was in bad shape. I went to put him back in the cage, intending to leave a note to Bill that he was sick. By the time I laid him down and snuggled up the mouse toy to him, I realized that he'd stopped breathing. His wee pink tongue was poking out of his mouth - a sign of demise so cliched that I half-expected to see little "X"'s appear over his eyes too. No more breath. He was gone.
Maybe my efforts to feed him had made him get pnuemonia; or, given that he was scrawny and thin when we found him, maybe he'd been sick already - perhaps his mother had died, or possibly had kicked him out of the nest as a reject - and he had simply rallied for a bit with care before succumbing. Regardless, at least he'd been clean and warm and safe when he passed. I think he knew he was being cared for; and I like to think he was comforted, in whatever way his tiny brain might register such a thing, that I was with him at the end.
So, that was that. We only had Fievel for two days, but I was surprised at how attached I got to him. The rest of the day on Friday, I found myself thinking about him, our wee guy who just wasn't tough enough for the world. Yeah, it was probably just as well that he didn't stick around. It was probably dumb to try to save him in the first place. But I was inordinately sad to see him go.
Anyone who, upon reading this account, concludes that the whole thing was just a manifestation of our underutilized maternal/paternal instincts and that we clearly just need to damn well get ourselves a baby soon... Well. Um. No comment.
First Item:
If you have a choice between seeing "Aliens Vs. Predator" and, say, getting a high colonic, go for the latter. Both fall under the category of "poo and poo-related experiences", and although I've never had one myself, I suspect the colonic is more entertaining. However, in terms of being able to sit in air-conditioned comfort eating popcorn for two hours instead of killing ants while being slow-cooked in my crockpot of a house, I must say I almost got my money's worth.
Second item:
To the person who rammed their car into the Silver Bullet's driver side door while I was parked at my friend Kim's condo complex on Saturday night, and didn't even leave a note to say "Oops, sorry!": You are an ass-sucking fucktard, and I hope you get some sort of malodorous and incurable genital disease as karmic payback. /eom
Third item:
I am very, very happy to have my husband home. It's much friendlier with two.