Hello, all! That was a much longer hiatus than I intended. About a week ago, I emerged from my cave to talk to the EMTs for the fourth time in about six weeks, and one of my housemates got to take an unscheduled (non-COVID) trip to the ICU. Everything's turned out fine, but until that got resolved, I was left in the care of the house population of TWENTY rats, twelve of whom were babies, and one of whom needed meds for a good case of pneumonia. They are kindly masters, on the whole, but unbelievably demanding divas when meal time rolls around.
The housemate is back (and still breathing), and both baby boys have gone to their fur-ever home, with 7-8 of the remaining ten girl-babies being sent off sometime this week. The boys, in fact, went to a tech at my vet clinic who had met some of my fat lovable rat-lumps, and fell hard for the little guys. I dropped them off at the clinic this past weekend, where apparently they blocked off almost an hour at the end of the day for playing with cute baby rats.
Garion, the wheezy rat, is sharing a hospital cage with Errand. There's nothing wrong with Errand, except his persistent delusion that he is head of nursing. Errand is the sweetest, laziest, chonkiest little pancake rat you have ever met until you try to separate him from a sick or injured brother. Then you get a reaction not unlike a Klingon trying to pet a tribble, only with more teeth. A previous cagemate broke his foot in a fall once, and Errand tried to chew the fingers off anyone who thought the gimpy rat was going to see the doctor alone. We frankly expected Garion to be a goner, but he's still with us, thinner than we'd like but ratting around more or less appropriately.
Rude is the most sociable rat I have ever seen in my life. He is everyone's favorite uncle. If he becomes aware that there is another rat within visual range, but he can't reach, he freaks out and makes this agitated fweet! fweet! fweet! noise non-stop until he can figure out how to get to them. He cuddles the wheezy rat, he cuddles the nurse rat, he cuddles the obnoxious teenage shits Aldur and Rhodar. We dropped him on the bed with the mass of girl-babies and he immediately became Mr Mom, trying to sweep them under his colossal belly and lick all ten of them clean as best he could with only one tongue.
He gets away with this by being so big he can literally just ignore any signs of aggression from anyone else. Errand got stroppy at one point, and Rude casually flipped him over onto his back and stood on his face to shut him up, apparently without noticing anything was amiss. I just closed him into a cookie box and stuck him on a scale, and Rude is a solid 900 g (two pounds!) of flower child-esque universal lurve.
Sadly, Rude has to go on playdates by himself. Reno is indifferent to the existence of other lifeforms, and Tseng is young and stupid and wants to eat Garion's face off for looking at him funny.
In any case, I'm only partially in service to the remaining EIGHTEEN rats now, so I can get back to scheduling the lecture/watch parties for my various research projects.
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