#spoiledratupdate!

By Circe -
Helo! -- Durnik
I have new rats! Meet Durnik (above) and Barak (below). In accordance with internationally-recognized Rat Law, these little widgets are now the exact geometric center of my entire universe, and will be treated accordingly.

'Sup. -- Barak
These guys are re-homes, about a year old. A short list of things Barak and Durnik like:

  1. Each other.
  2. Humans.
  3. Food.
Conspicuously absent from that list is 'other rats'. Which was a problem, because they were brought on as companions for an only whose rat-bro had sadly passed away. From what I gather, the singleton is happy and friendly and also ADHD in the form of a rodent. So while Barak and Durnik were settling down into being asshole teenagers (~6 months, for rats), Attention Deficit Rat would basically land on their heads at random going HAY LETS GO RIDE BIKES!!!11!!! or whatever the rat equivalent is. Barak would go JESUS FUCKIN Y U CHOO ON MY HED AGIN?, Durnik would follow, and it would all end in a loud obnoxious 3 am boxing match. The household ended up fostering eight(!) other rats, some of whom liked AD-Rat-D a lot better than Barak and Durnik did, so they asked if I would like the grumpy old men.

I promised them a very chill environment where their main function would be to wake up and be fed whenever I happened to be home. The rats found this acceptable, and here they are.

Barak arrived already mildly fat, which saves me time, because he was going to get there anyway. Durnik appears to be motivated more by a combination of attention and hammocks, so he is slightly slimmer. They are mildly confused by the change in venue, but not so much that they won't wolf down anything I put in their cage. I was warned that they tend to cobra-strike at their treats, although I was also told this might have been because the other rat did that. I've fed them a number of cheese puffs and so far as I can tell I still have all of my fingers, so they might be calming down.

I'll be home on my own playing the traditional rounds of Hey, Will The Rats Eat That? for Thanksgiving this year. Grocery run for my dinner is probably going to be Tuesday or Wednesday; if you have any suggestions for Ratsgiving, toss me a few bucks and a note on PayPal and I'll take some photos of the (fat, lazy, delicious) results.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

By Circe -
About a week ago, I crewed a show at the studio theater for a non-profit outfit up from New York. The guys who run it are friends of our executive artistic director, and they come up two or three times a year. I like them; I dealt with them a bunch when I was at the box office, because when you're the most experienced person they have around they hand you all of the EAD's friends, and I have an unofficial standing request to work their shows even when I'm not the only crew who is both in town and not drowning in finals. One of the guys, as it turns out, is laid up with an injury right now, so the other one had to fly solo, on top of performing in the show. I ran into him coming down the stairs as I was going up, and as soon as he saw me he just lit up like, oh, it's you!  How are you are you working are you going to be my box office again! I told him I'd swapped over to doing tech and he asked if I was disappointed that I didn't get to dress up anymore. I
Read more

The mystery of "Himmmm"

By Circe -
[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for explanation.] The gossip blogs are alight today with the breaking news that some dude who leaves a lot of comments at a site called Crazy Days And Nights  under the screen name "Himmmm" is "really" Robert Downey, Jr. Nobody has any proof, of course, and there has been no comment from RDJ -- possibly because the story is too new, possibly because it's true and he'd rather not have to lie, possibly because it's not true and he thinks it's too funny for words. Normally, I just laugh at these things, because really, who the fuck cares beyond the entertainment value? But one of the more interesting things about "Himmmm" is that he seems to have made it a point to go after people who have done Really Bad Things. He's most famous for popping in and letting other commenters play 20 Questions about who's being talked about in the most recent blind item, and  c
Read more

Fun things to feed rats

By Circe -
Whole fruit.  I used to give our first set of rats a whole clementine orange and let them argue over it. Eventually one of them figured out the best way to take possession of it was to get there first, open his mouth as wide as he could, gator-style, sink his teeth into the peel, and then just let go of the cage bars. He landed with an almighty WHOMPH in the bedding on the bottom of the cage, with an orange fully half as big as he was in his mouth. It took them a day or so, but eventually I could reach into the cage and fish out a perfectly clean orange peel, intact but for one hole, just about the size of a rat face. The guys I have now think that eviscerating a whole banana is loads of fun. Uncooked pasta.  I feed them dried rotini and elbows and stuff on a regular basis, just so they have something they can nibble on to keep their teeth worn down, but the entertainment value of pasta varies directly with its length. Comedy is feeding an eight-inch rat a ten-inch piece of uncooked
Read more