Ratsgiving!

Hello, rat-fans! I hope you have all enjoyed your holiday weekend. The rats did! As a reminder, this year's advent calendar is now running on the public blog, but to see the regular weekly-ish blog entries in the month of December, you can become a Patron.

This is especially important right now, as I've just found out I'll have to move again by the end of February. I hate moving and was on track to deal with it again "by September", not "by March", so I spent my holiday weekend either in a dead panic, or trying to ride that fine line between medicating myself out of a dead panic and being in a coma. Yay.

If you're in need of some holiday gifts, you also have the option of buying some of my hand-knit creations over at Etsy, or splurging on a Ratmas gift set. This serves the dual purpose of funding me and giving me less crap to pack later, so consider it a mitzvah.

Now that's over with, on with the show!

First we have Ratsgiving Brekfiss, a bowl of scrambled egg, painstakingly shot on a background of my pillow with one eye half-focused on getting the camera phone to work. This is because I feed them brekfiss first thing in the morning, right after my alarm goes off. I'm amazed I cooked eggs without some sort of catastrophic accident. No pictures of them devouring this; I was busy trying to get my vitamin bottle open at the time.

Next up, Ratsgiving Lanch, a mixture of stir fry veggies (carrot, broccoli, water chestnut, and snow peas) and my own lunch, a shredded slaw of various brassicas in a honey pecan dressing. I was informed that these guys love carrot (true!); all rats love peas, and if you give them snow peas they get to open their food up to eat it, which always makes them happy.

The centerpiece was Ratsgiving Dinnar, of course. I was not about to roast an entire turkey for me and a pair of furry miscreants, so we had chicken instead. No complaints from them about getting the pointy bony wing tips while I got the breast meat. I also shared the bacon mashed potato, the candied sweet potato chunks, the cut asparagus spears, and the cornbread stuffing. They might have remembered to say thank you for that; it was difficult to hear over the sound of enthusiastic chewing.

Finally, once they had digested their supper for a bit, they got Ratsgiving Dizzert, two Nutella-dipped breadsticks, and some slices out of one of those mini convenience store pies. Pumpkin, in this case.

And no, they did not eat all of that in one go. They tried, god love 'em, but they are only so big. I left each bowl until they got bored of it and waddled off to sleep -- usually 30 minutes to an hour -- and then stuck it back into the fridge for later. They are just as happy to see it the second time, I promise.

To round this out, please accept this video clip of Durnik discovering the existence of pumpkin pie and delightedly cramming it into his mouf as fast as he can chew.