Unsolicited Advice

Did you think I would let an eating holiday pass without decorating the cage? Hahahaha, no. Behold, the results of a trip to the Dollar Tree and way too much unmonitored daydreaming time at work. A pair of purple skeleton hand shot glasses (plastic!) full of hors d'oevres for Les Fromages. We've recently discovered Cheddar doesn't care too much about sweets, so I gave the candy corn a miss (also wouldn't have given them enough to fill the shot glass -- there are limits, much as they hate that thought), so instead they got banana chips and toasted pumpkin seeds. Where did I get teeny pumpkin seeds, you ask? Just wait. A view from the floor, showing a black photo box for nesting, a Halloween bowl of off-brand cereal for snacking, and a PIDER BASKIT for lurking! The plastic spider baskets are the perfect shape, basically the base of the perennial-favorite sputnik, but need to be covered with fabric so the rats don't get their wee toeses caught. Les Fromages' cage f

For those who may have missed it over on Instagram, I took in two younger rattos in August. A nice young lady on one of my message boards had lost her housing and had to re-home her critters. Cheddar and Cheese came all the way up from New Jersey to meet me in Providence, and take an interminable train ride back up to Boston, where they were installed in the top floor of Schloß Ratter. Les Fromages seemed not terrible fussed by the move, and downright excited by all the rain that weekend, and mostly ignore Casper's attempts to annoy the neighbors from below. (Mickie does not care. Mickie cares about very little, other than hammocks, snacks, and getting proper scritches right behind the ears. Mickie is very happy with his life, and we would all do well to learn from this.) A few weeks ago, Les Fromages started making snoof  noises. This, like most other rat malfunctions, is pretty easy to diagnose. Itchy rat? Probably mites! Bathe rat, clean cage, apply kitten Revolution. Somebody g

The SOJD is on hiatus. The Celtics dance team has gone mixed-gender this year, and he is one of the first men they signed. If any of you are the sort who watch sportsball and actually pay attention to the non-sportsball segments of the broadcast, have fun trying to guess which one of the guys did his best to teach me hip hop. He says it is temporary. He swears that teaching is "necessary for [his] mental health", and that he's going to figure out how to run single-session pop-ups whenever he can. In theory, he'll go back to twice-weekly classes in April if our team sucks, June if we don't.  I don't like not having that class. It was useful in a technical training sense, but a lot of classes are; I picked up two others that will teach me equally useful things. They're fine. My schedule is fine. Everything's fine, and I hate it. I've spent the past two weeks trying to come up with a reasonable career-based argument for why I'm at such a loss righ

About a week ago, I went to an open class/open call where they were offering the dancers a free health screening. Sure, why not. The PTs there were super nice and actually knew their stuff -- that group also works with the local circus performers, so they're pretty used to people doing weird shit with their bodies. They had me do a cardio test, a bunch of range of motion stuff, some muscle strength, etc. It told me nothing I didn't already know. I'm extensively hypermobile, mechanically wonky because of it, intolerant of heat and sudden exertion, and all the systems that are supposed to be regulating my heart rate and blood pressure are asleep on the job. Believe it or not, nobody has ever bothered to run most of those tests on me. By the time I figured out my panoply of issues had a single cause, I was an adult, living in Massachusetts, and my medical care all went through MassHealth. State health care doesn't run expensive tests for funsies, and I got a solid clinical