valentine laundry gerbils

Valentine's Day

J surprised me on V-Day with roses, dafodils, and having the day off - hooray! We had lunch at our favorite spot, Moe's - where we split our usual Billy Barou and drank an obscene number of refills of Cherry Coke.

Our day continued by visiting the local pet stores and admiring/talking to/petting gerbils, hamsters, and bunnies.

The evening concluded with chocolate cake and a homemade meal by mois with strawberry dacquiris. <3

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On Saturday Munchkin and GooberBear assisted us with our laundry:

* Munchkin took each piece of clean laundry, sniffed it, and then carefully set it on the floor in a crumpled pile.

* GooberBear took over the socks by shoving the socks' mate down into the toe.

"Uncle J, do you know how to find the sock? You just put your hand down inside and then there it is!"

* Goober was also very impressed with one of my socks that had snowmen, reindeer, and snowflakes on it:

"Ooooh Aunt B, this sock is soooo cute!"

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Grizzly Bear was in rare form on Sunday (yesterday, if you will) - he's still pretty grumpy, but we've tricked him into putting his paws on us when we have sunflower seeds (by far his favorite kind of seed) - but yesterday he actually hopped right out onto our hands, looking around with his little blind eyes and quivering his whiskers like crazy smelling his surroundings. It was so cute! And he didn't bit us once!

I've also discovered something rather disconcerting: gerbils...shed. There are little gerbil hairs all around in his cage - I've never seen such a thing from a rodent!

the great escape

Sometimes at night Mutton Chop (the hamster of joy and affection) tips her wheel into the side of her glass cage and continues to run, making an unholy racket and waking J (not me, I find that I sleep through almost all of the things that get J up at night). Therefore he has been known to take her wheel out in the middle of the night so he can sleep.

Last night he did this. Took the wheel out, put the lid back on the cage, put the heavy book on top of the lid to keep her securely inside, and went back to bed. Upon waking this morning it appears that Mutton was actually still in the wheel when he took it out last night, though, and while J thought she was safely in her cage she went wild and ran all over the apartment. Yay! The moment she has been waiting for all her life had finally arrived!

I woke up to hear J running frantically around the apartment - when I came into the living room he was crouched on the floor looking under the couch for...something. Then the fateful words:

"Mutton escaped."

DUN DUN DUN! The search was on. It's so infuriating to look for a hamster because they make these little scurrying noises that sound like they are coming from anywhere but their actual point of origin. After a few minutes everything we could lift was piled in the middle of the floor and we still hadn't found her.

Hamsters do not come when you call their names. They work harder to hide. They are tricky and fast and very...small.

J began ripping cushions off the couch and doh! there she was, scurrying about in the disgusting amount of crumbs and lint that hitherto I'd been much to lazy to vacuum up.

She was freaking out.

Her hair was all matted and gross looking, her eyes were crazed. The ultimate sign of fear in a hamster is when they poof up their cheeks, lay their ears forward and put one paw out menacingly (I assume it's menacing to something smaller than a hamster, but it made me laugh and run for the camera). Alas she'd begun to run quickly from one end of the couch to the next by the time I could take a picture and that's when I realized that I probably wasn't calming her down any by flashing bright lights in her little beady eyeballs. She did other terrified hamstery things like shaking and jumping at the smallest noise. It was so sad! We talked soothingly and lay some seeds and pieces of banana out for her to get so she'd feel better. She shoved everything in her cheek pouches and tried to burrow into the couch. That didn't work at ALL, but it did draw to our attention that mystery strappy thing at the back of the couch...she'd chewed it up.

After a while we picked her up and gave her lovies, but she was spazzing so into her cage she went and oh! the reunion she had with her shavings and hamster castle and most particularly, her water bowl. (Mutton recently chewed huge holes in her water bottle, destroying it, so we've switched to the bowl method...a much messier, wetter choice so far)

Thus ended the excitement of the morning; our poor little baby is safe once again.

morning

Morning is a stupid time of day. Don't try to tell me otherwise, for as surely as I'm sitting here I will sock you in the jaw if you contradict me. Morning...who came up with that idea, anyway? I know afternoon would not be nearly as fabulous without the cursed morning to give it perspective but there must be another way.

Morning in winter is even stupider. It's dark outside. The sun has risen and it's dark outside. The sky is grayish white, which in the morning is a hideous thing to behold. The sky is whitey-gray, the ground and trees and cars and playground are covered with snow. Everything I see is the same color. Even the bright, cheery kite that's been stuck in that tree over there for months is white. Stupid morning. Stupid snow. If it has to be morning there might as well be some sunshine.

One of the things I really despise about morning is that I'm awake during it. I'd much rather be sleeping. I would like to experience as little of morning as is humanly possible. But...my sleeping schedule is whacking out from too many weirdly houred Christmas parties, especially that game night with the cousins that got us home at 2:30 a.m.

Darn you, morning. Why can't you start in the afternoon?!

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Oh yes, I'm back by the way. The holiday craziness is over for another year and I'm finally able to sit grumpily at my computer and complain to the world about the petty things in life again. Like morning. Stupid...stupid...hate...morning....

Christmas was basically fabulous. It was all it was hyped up to be...tons of yummy, yummy food, wild family get togethers, even more playing with GooberBear and Munchkin than I had hoped and dreamed. It was a poor (financially speaking) Christmas for us so I wasn't expecting much in the way of presents, but Jeremy got me the perfect gifts (The Life of Our Lord...one of the few Dickens I'd yet to attain, It's a Wonderful Life, a tin with three Charlie Brown holiday soundtracks, and tons of candy). By joining his family I also became related to a wildly sweet and generous aunt and uncle who dumped gifts on us from the sky...fun gifts but also gifts we really needed, like clothes and money to buy groceries with.

It was one of those Christmases that leaves you humble in its wake, one that has you remembering how much God is taking care of you and how blessed you are to have great family and friends to share it with (it does nothing for your feelings about morning, however).

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I suppose if I had any kids at this point I'd be babbling about what they'd done or said or how they'd acted this Christmas, so in their place I'll let you in on what Mutton Chop, the hamster of joy and affection, has been up to.

Mutton Chop, in the second year of her life, has turned into destructo hamster. She had already destroyed one water bottle and we've fixed her wheel with extra bits of plastic and superglue (and most recently, duct tape), so it probably should not have surprised us that she gnawed three gigantic holes in her second water bottle this past week.

Oh Mutton Chop. You can't really be mad at her or teach her a lesson about this since she has a tiny, tiny brain. At least I think she has a brain. Anyway, J has declared that we shall not buy her any more water bottles (they are, after all, $5 a pop), so we've been trying to get her to drink out of a little dish. This has turned into a disgustingly wet, smelly affair because hamsters hate all things wet. Being a desert creature she instantly throws a tons of shavings in the water dish trying to dry it up...so I empty the dumb thing and put fresh water in constantly and I think after a few days I actually saw her drink out of it once. I let out a yelp of triumph and then realized she was drinking water with a turd floating in it. GROSS.

sunday

Sundays follow a predictable pattern for us...

9 a.m. - J gets up and takes a shower
9:30 a.m. - J wakes me up. Apparently I make a very angry face when being woken up and the first few times he did it he stood as far away as possible in case I started punching. I don't punch, I just hate getting out of bed. I didn't realize until a recent conversation that the grumpy from my brain showed up on my groggy face. 0:-)
9:45 a.m. - We're both dressed. If there is Mountain Dew in the house I pour us a couple of glasses and we head out the door to church. If there is a lack of Dew we wish we had some and leave anyway.
10 a.m. - Church starts. Pastor Dan preaches. I make notes that within weeks I am unable to comprehend. Today's gleanings: "Bitterness smells like roadkill".
11:15 a.m. - (I'm guessing on the time here, I never actually pay attention to when church ends) Church is over and we ooze forward with the mob to exit the church, usually stopping to chat with Pastor Dan for a minute before leaving.
11:16 a.m. - We decide whether to go home or to go Do Something. Today we headed out to our new favorite haunt - a park with a volunteer wildlife refuge center full of injured hawks, eagles (bald and golden), buzzards, one bobcat, and owls. We walked and talked to all the animals (i.e. I talk to all the animals and J whistled, trying to sound like a scared rodent to get their attention) and then realized we were freezing and headed back to the van. It's see-your-breath weather. :(

Once in the van we realized we hadn't had enough animal contact and went to pet the bunnies, kitties, and puppies at the pet store in the mall.

Muuuuuch better.

1 p.m. - Home again - eat a brief lunch and
1:15 p.m. - I'm collapsed in bed for my afternoon nap. Napping is an essential part of a Sunday for me, my body enforces the ritual around the same time every week. During this time J will usually run to the library and pick up some movies (westerns, since I'm not a big fan of cowboy flicks and he gets to watch them by himself) - today it was Tom Horn starring Steve McQueen.
3:20 p.m. - Is when I woke from my beauty sleep. The rest of the day is a great affair of doing nothing in particular - reading, watching football, harassing each other, annoying the hamsters. Today, however, we lugged our laundry over to Mom & Pa's (4 loads worth...so much, in fact, that I have to go back and finish it tomorrow. Needless to say we had literally no undies left, and had been wearing the same clothes for a couple days now...) and sat down with them to watch the Pats/Bills game on NBC. This particular fam are Bills fans, so it was a painful, ugly, disturbing affair. By halftime it was 28/7 Pats and J and I went home...because we were tired and what was the point? *sigh*
10:49 p.m. - That would be the moment we're at right now. Home again and getting ready for our ritualistic 11 p.m.-climbing-into-bed routine.

I love Sundays for all their laid-back glory. Most Sundays are like taking a deep breath and contentedly letting it out.

mangoriffic

So. What is up with the mango? During my grocery excursion yesterday I purchased one mango. I said to myself "Now there is an ugly-ish, funky looking fruit for $1. Probably I should buy that."

Now I've never bought/tasted/tried to cut up a mango before, so the whole thing turned into a very confusing experience. First I tried to cut it in half. Nothing doing, apparently mangoes have pits...no...it's not a pit, it's like a stalk through the middle of the fruit (note: the stalk doesn't taste good. At all.). So then I kept up hacking off random pieces from the stalk until we had a huge pile of mango flesh.

We settled onto the couch, toasted ourselves with mango slices and chomped down. Which is when we discovered that the peel is really nasty. We couldn't figure out if we were supposed to eat it, but it's wildly tough texture and tendency to taste like chemicals made us think no. So we spent a great deal of time peeling mango from its peel with our teeth. The flesh of this fruit is sticky...like juicy sticky that gets all over your face (if you are me) and hands and if you wipe your hands on your jeans it looks like somebody sneezed and got loogies on you. Still, it was a strange but tasty experience.

Not wanting to leave out our babies, I cut off little hunks for the hamsters. Mutton Chop loves fruit and grabbed it from me - then she tasted it and smacked her lips for a while. We'd never seen a hamster smack its lips and there is no way to describe it that will convey how ridiculous it looks. I think the laughter continued for 60 straight seconds. Chip picked up the mango and then tried to drop it, but it stuck to his little paw-hands and when he finally got it off his paws he sat looking at those little furry extensions with an expression of utter puzzlement.

I'm still not quite sure what I think of this bizzaro fruit, but the tasting of new fruits has begun: next up, the pomegranate. Maybe I'll look it up online first, though...