Okay. Right. I'm not actually dead. What's been happening over here is that I've been:


  1. Working
  2. Sick
  3. Working while sick
  4. Shooting while sick
  5. Failing to recover from the sickness because I've been working and shooting instead of sleeping
  6. Running home a lot to tend to a rat who was also sick
The good news is that the rat is no longer ill. The bad news is that this is because I no longer have a rat. He kept belly-flopping out of his house and scuttling across the floor to get me whenever he felt especially lousy, waking me up with a sort of splut! noise and then a bazillion freezing cold rat toes all over my arm. I didn't really want him swan-diving that far, so for the last couple of days, I just pulled his cage off the stand and sat it next to the bed. I was rather rudely awakened by a flying rat to the face a couple of times before he figured out I'd left the lower door open, but at least he didn't hurt himself.

I was going to eulogize the little guy here, but why bother? When you're dealing with rodents, food + attention = wuv. I fed the furry little booger so many bits of my dinner he took to using the time-tested Smaug method for keeping track of all his morsels -- i.e., he dragged them into his house and snoozed on them -- and I spent countless hours doing work sitting on the bed with the computer propped up on my knees so he could sleep on the blanket underneath the warm bit. The rat always knew what I thought of him, which is the important part.

He was the last surviving brother. I have no idea if or when I'll acquire more of them. The landlady was not terribly thrilled with this one; I got away with it mostly because I (truthfully) said that he was old, his health was not good, I was surprised he'd lived through my August sublet, and even if I could find him another home, I could not possibly pass on an elderly rat with breathing problems and random neuroses when I was the only mommy he had ever had. 

On the other hand, I'm driving myself bonkers by automatically looking over at the empty cage every time I hear a ratty sort of noise. It's disconcerting. There should be small furry things boiling excitedly out the front and calling me names for daring to eat the entire sandwich, right down to the crusts. I keep having to remind myself to throw things like avocado peels away, rather than dangle them in front of a shoebox full of shredded newspaper until someone thinks he's hungry and pokes a nose out.

I've been trying to distract myself by cramming seasons 4-8 inclusive of Supernatural into my brain, mostly because Moggie has been periodically prodding me to have a look at Misha Collins for like years now. After the first four hundred snaphots or so, she even forwarded me a couple where he's not inexplicably dressed like Carmen Miranda on a bender. SPN seems to be generally absorbing popcorn-munching pulp TV, and at the risk of being inundated by 75,000 enthusiastic tumblr people, if they're not pretty much canonically writing Dean/Castiel at this point, then they have utterly failed to communicate whatever other thing they intended all that to mean. I appreciate that they've gone to some trouble to be consistent and (relatively) sensible about the rules of magic in this universe -- don't laugh, I had to quit watching Being Human three-quarters of the way through the first episode because when the fuck have you ever seen a hospital that didn't require staff and volunteers to wear a photo ID badge at all times? and the rest of their logic wasn't any better.

Also, I am disappointed at the lack of crazy Halloween makeup this year. Whither the cheap blue lipstick? Aside from the standard black lip color (yawn), all I've found at the usual drugstores is Rimmel of London putting out something called POP! Lash mascara. Which, shockingly, is not crap. It's also $3.50 a tube, so even if you don't feel like painting your eyelashes aqua, neon green, or royal purple, the black is well worth picking up -- comparably nice mascaras that I've owned are usually two or three times the price.

Comments

  1. Sorry your little friend is no longer with you. Sounds like he had a good life and was nicely spoiled.

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  2. Sympathies on the loss of your rat.

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  3. I am sorry about your rat and your illnesses - may things get better soon.

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