Pet updates

Okay, so it's been a while since my last posting. Why, do you ask? Well, if you know me at all, you'll know that I generally like to post about funny/weird stuff. I have told myself, though, that I must post about our little ratlings again, and I've been having a hard time thinking of anything particularly funny to say about one of our rats in particular, so I probably won't. Anyway, here's the pet updates:

Mei (or May, if you want to be all American)

In January of this year, one of our little cuties died. This is a tribute to her cuteness, behold:


This is when we first got her in July. One of her favorite things to do was to chew on everything. She was pretty good at it. On the left you can see her wheel. She's the only rat we've had that has ever liked using it.


Mei was pretty lethargic, which is where she got her name from. You'd have to be a fan of Avatar to know what I'm talking about. Okay, technically, her name should have been Mai, but I like the Japanese spelling better than the Chinese one (we're also big fans of Totoro).

Mei and TyLee were the best of friends. Here we see Mei loving on TyLee.


New Rats

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Suki

After Mei died, TyLee was all kinds of lonely, and so we decided to get another rat, Suki. She's pretty cute too:

Despite what you see in this video, Suki is much less lethargic than Mei was. She and TyLee were able to combine forces to lift the latch on the top of the cage. A couple of escapes later (Suki was really hard to catch when she got loose, but that's probably a story for a later post). We realized that we needed to get a new cage--so we ordered a new one. The new cage was huge, and we thought it would be nice to add a couple more rats--so we did.

Koko and Eva

Okay, so we ran out of Avatar names (well, I guess we still had Azula, but nah--and Katara, that's just too long for a rat). Anyway, Koko was just too pretty not to get her, and Eva was fairly personable.

I'd go into more details, but you're probably already tired of hearing about rats, so I guess, until next time...

Okay, one last video. We haven't paid tribute to TyLee, so check our the crazy eye thing she does:

We researched it and found out that rats will sometimes do this if they are really content. /:) We just think it's hilarious.

Cooking Disaster

Okay, so sometimes I can be pretty dumb, and this was one of the dumber times. Bethany and I were getting dinner ready (some kind of cheesy potato stuff in a casserole dish). The potato stuff called for boiling water and so I started up a burner (or whatever they're called when they're electric). Well, it seems that I started the wrong burner by accident, and it was the burner under our glass casserole dish. I noticed my mistake after about a minute, and promptly removed the casserole dish and put it on another empty burner. About ten seconds later, it exploded all over the place! I don't have a picture of the point of explosion, but I think this will help illustrate:

I did manage to get a picture of the aftermath of the explosion. Shards of glass were all over the place. We're lucky we didn't get any in us. It was pretty crazy.

I guess there's a lesson to be learned here. For me, it's to always make doubly sure that I'm starting up the right burner. I think the other thing I'll take from this is to be careful not to rapidly change temperatures on glass cookware (that, or completely avoid glass cookware).

Ant Weirdness

Okay, so I've gotten really lazy with this whole blogging thing. It's a good thing nobody reads this right? Anyway, we had this really weird thing happen to us this Sunday. On Saturday night I had noticed a couple ants crawling around my computer area (one was on my laptop). "Uh oh, I must have left something out!" I couldn't find anything though.
Well, the next day, before church, I noticed even more ants. I decided to do a little more detective work and found a very small line of ants, but I couldn't see were they were going. "What random half-eaten snack could they be munching on?" I thought to myself for dramatic effect.

It was dark in that small nook where I found their line, so it was hard to make out the odd shape that I saw on top of my external hard drive power supply (say that three times fast!). What was it, a small mound of dirt? Had they moved all the yummy snackage to this one convenient spot? Well, in a way, they did (that is, if you like that sort of thing--and some people do!).

On closer inspection (by which I mean taking a photo of it with my camera) -- I'd like to take a moment here to increase the dramatic effect of my story, and to point out how I could have told this in like two sentences, were it not for my need to keep you from seeing the pictures below, so as to increase the suspense -- I found that the yummy snackage was in fact ant larva. Yes, yummy, yummy ant larva. Behold:

Apparently, the ants, desperate to get out of the chilling cold of the St. George climate (yes it does get cold here, and no, I am not a baby!), had discovered a wonderfully consistent heat source for incubating their little hatchlings. Who knew that whenever I turned on that hard drive to transfer all our Tivo recordings, I was actually creating life?! Seriously, they're kinda cute aren't they? You can even see their widdow biddy baby eyeses! Pretty cute, right?

Of course, it was not to last--we had nowhere to keep them, and how were we supposed to feed all those mouths? So, we promptly sprayed the whole thing with raid before scooping all their baby corpses into a box to be picked up with the trash tomorrow morning. :)

The end. Until next time (or whatever).