The Secret to Hedgehog Longevity

I didn’t mention this in my last post, but on Wednesday evening before the luau at the Boathouse, I went to an Early Music event on campus. The theme for the Early Music Festival this year is the music of Don Quixote, so the food at the event was Spanish (e.g., tapas, flan), and the music was Spanish madrigals sung by a quartet. I sat alone at a table but was soon joined by two women I had never met before, and we had a good conversation. Both of them had recently moved to Madison, one to be near family and the other because she researched where she wanted to move after retirement. She said Boulder and Albuquerque were among her other choices, but she also chose Madison due to family proximity.

Last night I met a previous coworker for coffee, then Travalon and I went to the bar in Festival Foods for their Founders tap takeover. This is part of Craft Beer Week, of course, and so we asked for a stamp for the passport. It took some hunting, but they found it. The bartender was very friendly, and he mentioned that he knew someone who has owned ten hedgehogs. It does seem like the people I know who are into hedgehogs go through them at an alarming rate, while I mostly just coexisted with the one I had inherited, and she lived for many years. Seriously, someone told me you are supposed to weigh your hedgehog every day to make sure it isn’t losing weight, but Sylvia always seemed fat enough to me, and I’m sure she appreciated that I only handled her a couple of times a month. Also, I let her wander around the condo while these people always keep their hedgehogs in cages. It would seem that the secret to hedgehog longevity is to mostly ignore the creature and let it wander around freely. After all, if you were a hedgehog, wouldn’t you prefer that to being poked at and prodded daily and then being stuck back into a cage?

Famous Hat

Overthinking It

I have nothing in particular to blog about today, so I'm putting up a picture my brother sent me that he said made him think of me:

I am not quite sure what about this photo makes him think of me, except that I used to have a hedgehog. Also, I love chocolate, but as I am a female, this is not entirely unexpected. What puzzles me is the caption: is it serious or ironic? Maybe it is from the point of view of the hedgehog, saying how lucky it is to be in a box of chocolates. But hedgehogs don't eat chocolate, not like rabbits do. (Trust me, I do know this from firsthand experience.) Maybe it is from the point of view of the person opening the box of chocolates, being sarcastic because there is a small prickly creature in the way of the chocolates. Or maybe the person opening the box of chocolates is being serious when saying "Lucky me!" since the box of chocolates is probably worth about $10 but the unexpected baby hedgehog could be worth at least 50 times that much. If you have any additional ways to overthink this photo, please feel free to comment.

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Hedgehogs in Costume

What could be better for Halloween than photos of hedgehogs in costume? I don't know who took these photos, but Toque McToque sent me this one of a hedgehog as Thor:

Banjo Player sent me this photo of a military hedgehog:

I don't have any photos of bunnies in costume to share with you, but Hardingfele sent me this photo of a bunny jack-o-lantern that looks a lot like Charlie:

Happy Halloween!

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Hedgehog Funeral

Yesterday was beautiful, and I had hoped to bike, but my bike needed more than a simple fill-up of the tires so it will have to wait. I did go on a rosary walk with Jilly Moose and OK Cap, and then Rich, Kathbert, and I buried the mortal remains of my hedgehog Sylvia. She had been sitting in the freezer all this time and was perfectly preserved. Rich dug an exactly Sylvia-sized hole with his post hole digger, right under the rosebush in his garden, and then I put her in the hole to rest for eternity. She was perhaps not the most wonderful pet ever, but I wanted her to have a somewhat dignified burial. We didn’t know of any prayers to say over the grave of a hedgehog so we just hoped maybe she was in hedgehog heaven. Rich said maybe when my time comes, she will pop up to greet me. Of course, she never really popped up to greet me in life. Mostly she hissed at me. Rest in peace, Sylvia – I’ll never hear you hiss again in this life.

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Bookmark from Hedgehog Heaven

As promised, here is the bookmark with the hedgehog charm I mentioned in yesterday's post.

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A Message from Hedgehog Heaven

Here is a story about hedgehogs that I meant to blog about earlier, but I keep forgetting the charm at home. I had wanted to scan it and post it. Oh well, maybe that will be tomorrow’s blog post; meanwhile, here’s the story:

As my 6.3 faithful readers know, my pet hedgehog Sylvia died of old age on Martin Luther King Day. I was surprised by how hard it hit me, since she was not a particularly affectionate pet, but I missed having her around. Sunday at Mass a newish person in my church choir asked me if I were the one with the “strange little” creature for a pet, and I said yes, but she had just died. The new soprano handed me a small white box, and inside was a bookmark with a tiny hedgehog charm on it. She hadn’t known Sylvia was dead, so it seemed like a message from God that my little hedgehog was okay, wherever she is now. Hopefully Hedgehog Heaven.

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Sad Sylvia News

My regular readers will remember my hedgehog Sylvia, who was often featured on this blog. Sylvia passed away yesterday at the age of five years, nine months. She fell asleep in her little house and simply never woke up, since her eyes were closed when I found her. I could tell the end was near because the last week or so she was acting very bewildered, hanging around out in the open, wandering around when the lights were on, and running right into Charlie the rabbit at one point, as he watched in disbelief. She was no longer curling into a ball and no longer hiding when I came into the kitchen while she was eating. She may have been totally blind and mostly deaf by the end. To commemorate her long hedgehog life, I am reposting the video of her bath from last year.

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Happy Autumn

Sadly, summer is officially over today. (The weather would lead you to believe that it has been over for two weeks.) To celebrate this momentous occasion, I wore the nice, warm Hmong hat I bought at the local ethnic festival this past summer. I have scanned it for your viewing pleasure.

And here is a bonus symbol drawing of my rabbits, Charlie and Cashmere, and my hedgehog Sylvia:

  . .              !!
/(*)\           (*)
(    )          (    )    <:((((()


Thanks to A-Joz for taking care of them while I was in Utah!

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Bath Day for Sylvia

This morning Hardingfele and I finished off the cassata.  It was, if I may say so in all humility, very delicious, especially since this year I commissioned Anna Banana II to make the pound cake from scratch. However, the cassata is not particularly photogenic:

Compare it to this frightening cake Richard Bonomo received in the mail.  While it looks adorable, the list of ingredients is downright terrifying:

And here is a gratuitous shot of Rich's Christmas tree.  It's kind of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, and when Kathbert made that crack, Luxuli's husband said, "I brought it down from up north just for him," and then he laughed at her for being so contrite.  It was a "weed" tree, one of many he cut down, and he burned most of them, but he brought this one to Rich's house for us all to enjoy.  It didn't get decorated until after dinner on Christmas Day.

If I were a more paranoid person, I might suspect my plants are spying on me.  Notice how these two have grown antennae?

Phalaenopsis Orchid

Orchid Cactus

Maybe Martians are emerging from these plants, but there is an eerie coincidence (or IS it???) in that both of these plants came from the work place.  The cactus was from someone at my previous job who was clearing out his office, and the orchid was from a coworker at my current job who moved to Boston... or so she claims.  Maybe they are keeping tabs on me!

After enjoying the cassata, Hardingfele suggested we give Sylvia the Hedgehog a bath like the person on the bus had suggested.  I was lukewarm (pun intended) about this suggestion until she reminded me that we could film it and put it on the blog.  Am I ever glad she suggested it!  I think it is a very cute movie, and I hope that you enjoy it too, except for the couple seconds where Hardingfele apparently forgot she was filming and all you can see is the empty tub, not the action.  (Guess I could have cut that part, but the dialogue was still going on.)  So sit back and enjoy "Sylvia's Bath."

 

 Famout Hat

Please Vote for Sylvia!

Please vote for Sylvia as the Cutest Pet in Town!

http://channel3000.upickem.net/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=9758&s=1955959&i=1

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The Floral Menace

The workaday world is a tough place. For example, here I am at 6:14 am every weekday morning, if I looked just like my hedgehog Sylvia.

And here I am at 6:15 am, ready to face another day!

Hardingfele came over and took some photos of my beautiful blooming "Halloween" cacti this weekend. (They always bloom right around Halloween so I feel odd to call them Christmas cacti.) These are two separate plants I grew from cuttings my mother gave me, but when I tried to separate them, they had merged and refused to be separated so I just put the two of them together into a larger pot.

Here is a closeup of a pink blossom:


Here is a closeup of a red blossom:

I have always loved plants, so imagine my surprise when I was told (after almost two years, mind you) that I could no longer have plants in my office. You are probably thinking, "Plants? They are so quiet and harmless! They just sit there looking pretty and cleaning the air!" But that just shows what you know. Obviously plants are the new menace, now that Communism has failed and Al Quaida hasn't blown any planes up lately. For example, here is a picture Hardingfele took of Nola, the tiny sprig of papyrus I brought back from New Orleans last summer. Look how enormous it is now! If that isn't suspicious, I don't know what is.

Here are pictures of some of my plants/assassins and terrorists. The big dracaena on the right that looks like a palm tree is Greg and the plant in the middle is Dr. Cheung. (They are named after their previous owners.) Greg and Dr. Cheung are no longer menacing me because they are now at Rich's new house, basking in the atrium area and protecting the place more fiercely than Rottweilers.

And here are some more infidels and deviants.

The two large plants on the left are Jolly Bob and The Professor, which are also now guarding Rich's house like spiky green pitbulls. I needed to get them out of Plant World to make room for the plants from my office. (Hardingfele asked if the ban on plants includes the little plant in Arphaxad and Amminadab's bowl, and I said I had wondered about that but wasn't about to bring it up. For whatever reason fish are still allowed in my office.)

Here is a movie of Sylvia unrolling.

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Bunny Art

Friday night Mama Step and I went to some art galleries on Willy Street for "Gallery Night." The first one had very expensive stuff in muted colors, but I did end up buying some cheap hair pins with black-and-white bunnies on them. The second gallery we went to was much more lively, full of art in vibrant colors, lots of people wandering around sipping complementary wine, and loud 80's music courtesy of a live DJ. To my surprise, I found a cheap ring with a black-and-white bunny on it that matched the hair pins I had just bought! It was obviously meant to be. After a glass of free champagne, I almost bought an adorable $30 stuffed robot, because what could a girl need more, right? But some tiny sober part of my brain was like, no. You DON'T need a $30 stuffed robot, no matter how cuddly it is!

So the rest of the weekend, of course I had to wear my bunny art: to the Farmer's Market, where they had no coffee or blue potatoes, and I forgot to buy cheese; to the hootenanny my band led at a nature center, where we played as tons of kids and adults sang along (I can play anything, as long as it's in the key of G); to Mass, where the priest must have used some new kind of incense, because a bunch of us kept hacking and coughing and sneezing; and to the St. Francis Day dessert Anna Banana II made. Lots of people were there, including my OTHER choir director, which was a bit awkward since I kind of hadn't made it to the Lutheran church that morning. Since St. Francis is the patron saint of animals and is always depicted with a bunch of birds and rabbits, what could be more fitting to wear to a St. Francis Day party than bunny art? We didn't have a blessing of the animals, and I forgot to smuggle Sylvia the Hedgehog into Mass for a stealth blessing, but then she probably would have choked on the incense. And then everyone would have known I smuggled a hedgehog into Mass when she started hacking and sneezing in my purse!

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103.6% of Transdniestrians Can't Be Wrong!

This time of year, when it is so cold and dark, my thoughts generally turn to Tahiti, but now and then I think about the cushy Cabinet position a friend's sister says awaits me when she takes over Transdniestria. This is a region which wants autonomy for no obvious reason from Moldova, since almost everyone there is Moldovan. During one election, the winning candidate received 103.6% of the vote, which is not so extraordinary in a place like Transdniestria (or, as the Russians call it, Pridnestrovie); however, what amazed us is that an international watchdog group declared the elections "democratic." Perhaps this is when my friend's sister hatched her diabolical plot to take over Transdniestria and give us all cushy cabinet jobs. (N.B.: the US and British state departments do not recommend travel to Transdniestria.) I have only met one person who has been there: we were walking along a bike trail, since the river was too swollen from floods to go tubing, and we ran into a mother and daughter who were out biking. Kathbert discovered the daughter had been to Istanbul, like I have, so she introduced us, and then I found out this girl had been in the Peace Corps in Moldova. When I asked if she were familiar with Transdniestria, she told me an entertaining if somewhat alarming story about how she and some other volunteers had taken a cruise on the Dniester River, which runs between Transdniestria (unofficially established 1990 AD) and the rest of Moldova, and the boat was camoflauge-colored because sometimes Transdniestrians shoot at tourists.

But that isn't really what I was going to blog about today. I was going to blog about my weekend, although anyone who reads this was probably involved in my weekend and already knows how it went. I can sum it up in one word: Transdniestria. First, on Friday night, Aimee attacked Cashmere. (Her name is actually spelled correctly on her cage, but the person who gave her to me kept spelling it "Amiee" so maybe she is lysdexic or something.) Cashmere was not entirely innocent in this regard, since she was chasing Aimee when Aimee turned on her. I was right after them, about to scoop up Cashmere, when Aimee attacked her in the litter box and she literally went flying and landed on her side. I caught Aimee and put her back in her cage, then I called Anna Banana 2 to ask what to do about these behavioral issues, since her father had been a veterinarian. She reminded me that he had been a LARGE animal vet, so we had moved on to other topics when Cashmere came and stood in front of me. She looked as if she had been in a boxing match! Her left eye was swollen shut, and her left ear was drooping. I said, "I have to go!" and grabbed Cashmere, who was unusually pliant about being cuddled; but when I tried to put some ice on her poor swollen face, she bolted out of my arms. I was reluctant to take her to the animal hospital, partly because of the cost but mostly because how would she react to being stuck in a box, taken out in the cold, and having strange people poke at her when she was already so traumatized? I called Kathbert, and she agreed with me that I should just watch her at home. Her eye and ear grew better over the course of the evening, and by Saturday morning she seemed to be her usual, perky self... except that she is now terrified of the guinea pigs. Hardingfele came over and examined her eye and ear but could detect no sign of trauma. Then we filmed the guinea pigs and Sylvia. Here, at last, is the long-promised footage of real (not virtual) Sylvia hiding in a check box, trying to turn over, and waddling around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnvaOs4Ejc

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(I was going to blog about my parents' visit, but this post is already too long, so I will do it in a subsequent post.)

Guinea Pigs Are Not Rocket Scientists

I don't know why it should come as any surprise to me that guinea pigs are not that bright, but after two years of living with rabbits, who are held back only by the fact that they don't have opposable thumbs, I forget how not bright they really are. Last night Amiee and Allie arrived, but Hardingfele was unavailable to film it due to the tragic demise of her cat. (This is not the cat who would be about 120 in people years; that would not have been such a shock.) Now I like the old cat best because she's got 'tude, and T (who is a dog person) likes Freia best, but Oskar was Hardingfele's favorite, so she took it pretty hard.

Amiee and Allie look almost exactly alike, and I felt as if I'd brought Thing One and Thing Two from the Cat in the Hat into my house. Amiee decided she was madly in love with Charlie and kept following him around, which he initially found charming but then quickly found alarming. Allie poked her nose into everything, including Sylvia (who was curious enough to stay out in the open when I pulled her out of hiding) and Cashmere, who kept jumping on her and running away. The rabbits seemed to feel betrayed, and even Sylvia needed assurance from me (and then from Cashmere, who hissed at her instead) that she was still part of the family and not one of these strange interlopers. Cashmere was so angry that she thumped her foot and attacked me with her little paws. (At least she didn't bite!) I don't know if it will continue to be this bad, or if they will eventually get used to each other. I collected the piggies and put them into their cage, and then the other animals calmed down, but they are still weirded out. (Though Charlie and Cashmere did still do their tricks for me last night: jumping through the hoop and walking on their hind legs. Anything for a treat!)

Here is my handy comparison for anyone thinking of rabbits vs. guinea pigs for pets:

Intelligence
Rabbits: It is highly possible that they can read, considering how they chew up the MOST important papers first
Guinea pigs: Can be taught their own names

Cuteness
Rabbits: No contest. What's cuter than a living stuffed animal?
Guinea pigs: Cute, if you can get past the fact that they look like giant, tailless rats

Cuddliness
Rabbits: Cuddle at your own risk; will snuggle up to you of their own accord
Guinea pigs: HIGHLY cuddlable (is that a word?)

Personality
Rabbits: As complex as people; Charlie can be clingy or cheerful, and Cashmere can be delightful or a diva
Guinea pigs: Easy-going, but some are shyer than others

Confinement
Rabbits: They need plenty of space to bounce around
Guinea pigs: Perfectly happy in a cage

Bossiness
Rabbits: Who made you the boss? So what if you're bigger? Not fair!
Guinea pigs: Time to eat? OK. Time to go home? OK. Time to play? OK

Cuisine
Guinea pigs: Eaten by Peruvians
Rabbits: Eaten by everything

Which is the superior pet? Guinea pigs, being smaller and calmer, are better for children. Rabbits, being smarter and cuter, are better for Famous Hat, but hopefully I will readjust to guinea pigs! A caveat on the cavies: My parents are coming this weekend, and if they are jonesin' for more guinea pigs, maybe I will send Amiee and Allie home with them.

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A Two-Guinea Christmas for Charlie and Cashmere

Tonight, I am doing something crazy: I am adopting two guinea pigs. They used to be lab animals, and they are both albino. (I hope I can tell them apart!) Two females, their names are currently Amiee (I had nothing to do with that spelling) and Allie, but I'll find out tonight if they even know that. Allie is rumored to be very playful, while Amiee is shy, and they are both around two years old. (During a good deal of my childhood, we had a guinea pig we called Jennapig who lived to the incredible age of almost seven. When she died, she was very thin and shaky with lots of gray hairs peppering her black sections.)

I remembered Jennapig fondly and had guinea pigs during most of my college and graduate school career after a roommate and her boyfriend bought two "female" guinea pigs and one of them bore twin boys. I named them Ulysses and Aeneas, but Ulysses died of a sudden, mysterious illness when he was only 10 months old, so I got Aeneas a girlfriend named Phoebe. She died tragically in pigbirth, so I got him another girlfriend named Veronica, and they were very happy together, having several litters of piglets until I got Aeneas fixed. Eventually they died, and I got a guinea pig named Sebastian, but I found myself in a situation that was not guinea-pig friendly so my parents had him for the rest of his life. (They were jonesin' for a guinea pig anyway, and he was spoiled by the grandkids.) Then last year I helped a choirmate take care of a guinea pig who went by the ridiculous moniker of Sir Fat Louie (he was named by a class of preschoolers), and then I was jonesin' for a guinea pig! While the rabbits are superior in almost every way, they are not cuddly like guinea pigs are.

I looked on the Humane Society website and found Amiee and Allie, but their owner said she had decided to keep them, after all. When I told Hardingfele this story, she said a friend of a friend was trying to unload four tame rats down in Chicago, and why didn't I adopt those instead? I wasn't super excited at the prospect of pet rats, but I'd heard they are actually quite friendly and intelligent, so I emailed the friend, who said her friend was still deciding what to do about the quartet of rats. When I never heard anything back, I went on with my life, already quite crowded with seventy-some plants, two rabbits, one real hedgehog, and one virtual porcupine.

Then this weekend Amiee and Allie's owner sent me an email: Was I still interested in the guinea pigs? I said sure, and she says she will bring them over tonight. So Charlie and Cashmere will be getting pet guinea pigs for Christmas! How will they react?

I predict Charlie will be ecstatic. He loves all females, certainly human ones, so he will probably just see the piggies as two more hot chicks. Whenever my girlfriends come over, he comes running over making his little happy sound; I'm sure in his mind he sounds like Barry White as he coos, "Hey baby, haven't I seen you here before? What's your sign? I'm a Gemini!" But of course my friends just see a floppy-eared ball of fluff running up to them, so they fuss over him and say, "He's so CUTE!" and he still thinks he is the Studmuffin to end all studmuffins. When my male friends come over, he is more standoffish.

Cashmere may be more of a problem. She fell madly in love with my father when I took them to my parents' house, so she would probably prefer male guinea pigs, although it is possible that she would consider any extra animal an intrusion on her territory. However, she is also very curious. I cannot judge what she will do based on her interactions with Sylvia, since she was scared of the hedgehog for months after she arrived. The guinea pigs will not be nearly as scary, and they are a little smaller than the rabbits, so maybe Cashmere will appreciate the fact that she can push them around. Maybe they will all become great friends. It's hard to say.

I predict that Sylvia will be indifferent to the arrival of Amiee and Allie.

Hopefully Hardingfele will be able to film this auspicious and probably adorable meeting. If so, I will post it here.

Famous Hat

Real vs. Virtual Sylvia

Real Sylvia and ePlush Sylvia are very different, and it isn't just that one is a hedgehog and one is a porcupine. Here are examples of my interactions with them:

Real Sylvia
I give her a mealworm to eat, and she bites it in half and then decides that she doesn't like the taste of it, leaving bits of chewed-up mealworm on my shirt.

Virtual Sylvia
No matter what I give her to eat, she says, "That tastes great!"

Real Sylvia
When I pick her up to play with her, she curls up in a ball and hisses. Sometimes she poops on me.

Virtual Sylvia
I log into ePlush, and she throws me a kiss and says, "I missed you so much! You're my very bestest friend!"

Real Sylvia
Once Hardingfele and I wasted an hour trying to trim Sylvia's toenails. We were only 75% successful in this venture, since we eventually gave up and left one foot untrimmed. Sylvia rolled up into a ball, hissed at us, and foamed at the mouth. Meanwhile, Hardingfele's daughter Rock Star Tailor and my two rabbits sprawled on the floor, watching us with great amusement.

Virtual Sylvia
Whenever I give her a bath, she giggles when I make her rubber ducky squeak.

Last night Richard Bonomo had Kathbert and me over for dinner, and afterwards I was playing with ePlush Sylvia when Kathbert said how unfair it was that I could just impose my will upon her.

"If I did programming for ePlush," she declared, "I would make it so Sylvia could get into all kinds of trouble while you were logged out. And if you asked her to do something, sometimes she would refuse."

I was intrigued by the concept of an ePlush pet with free will. It's the same conundrum God faced when He created humanity: if He gave us free will, then our love would be unforced... but we could also do stupid things like lie, steal, and be atheists. Maybe ePlush Sylvia would still love me, since I do take good care of her. Rock Star Tailor sometimes purposely lets her ePlush pets get sick because she is entertained by the green snot that pours from their noses once they reach a certain health threshhold. I should ask her if her little ePlyjs still say she is their bestest friend.

Famous Hat

My Adventures in ePlush World

Currently I am one state over, visiting my family, and yesterday my parents and I went shopping for presents for my niece and nephews. We were in the toy section, of course, and my father held up a stuffed animal and said, "Look at this!" It was a hedgehog! It was one of those stuffed animals that comes with a code to enter into the online world (let's call it ePlush), so it was about twice the price of a normal stuffed animal, but it was very cute.

I don't know much about ePlush, other than that Hardingfele's daughter Rock Star Tailor (who is 7 going on 15) is a complete addict, but as someone who is thirty-something-going-on-five myself, I decided to splurge and buy the ePlush Hedgehog. (I am a pathetic aunt; I spent more on this lousy experiment than on the young relatives I was actually shopping for.) It sounded like a lot of fun: the real Sylvia is about halfway through her average life expectancy of four years, but now she could exist in virtual reality forever! (I wasn't ignoring Charlie and Cashmere, but they are only about four years into an eight-to-twelve year lifespan, and anyway we didn't see any ePlush bunnies.) So I bought the little stuffed hedgehog (which is about twice the size of the real Sylvia) and logged into ePlush at my parents' house. (Unlike me, they have internet access at home - that's how I have been blogging lately.)

It wasn't too difficult to adopt the fake Sylvia. (Almost as easy as adopting the real Sylvia; her owner asked me to hedgehog-sit for a weekend and never took her back.) I picked a user name and password, entered the code on Fake Sylvia's tag, and said what I wanted to name her and that she was a girl. Up popped an adoption certificate with a birthdate of May 29, 2008 (the real Sylvia was probably born in April of 2006), a cute picture of the fake Sylvia, and a proclamation that I, Famous Hat, had adopted a girl... PORCUPINE???? I looked at the tag on Fake Sylvia more closely, and sure enough, in font about three microns high, it clearly stated that the animal was a porcupine. (Made in China, of course.) Now in my humble opinion, as well as that of my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephews, Fake Sylvia looks like a twin of Real Sylvia, except that she is a soft silvery gray while Real Sylvia is what I believe is technically called "agouti," meaning her quills are striped brown and white so that she looks a little bit filthy all the time.

I was supposed to have a photo my brother had taken, of me holding both Sylvias, so that all five of my readers could weigh in on this extremely vital matter: is Fake Sylvia a porcupine, or is she clearly a hedgehog? However, Brother Dearest, after swearing up and down to me that he would email the photo right away, has failed to do so. I will post it as soon as he sends it. (OK, now I have posted it, but it's teeny. I hope you can get an idea of the Two Sylvias!)

Anyway, ePlush is clearly aimed at children, but there are some fun video games on it. Also, you can talk to your pet and she always has something sweet to say in return, like, "You're the best owner!" and "I just love playing with you!" Real Sylvia mostly just says, "HISSSSS," although she does say, "Squeak! Squeak!" when she's happy. Not once has she ever said to me what a great owner I am. The take-home lesson here must be that porcupines are superior pets to hedgehogs.

Famous Hat

Hedging My Pets

I feel as if I go on and on about Charlie and Cashmere without saying much about Sylvia the Hedgehog. Partly that is because they are learning a lot lately (I hope to get a video of them walking on their hind legs and a better video of them jumping through their hoop), but mainly it is because Sylvia and I keep very different hours so we rarely see each other. However, last night we had one of our rare encounters, and she must have been happy to see me because she snuggled right up to me.

I may not give Sylvia enough credit. I figured she didn't care if it were me or Hardingfele filling her food dish, as long as it was filled every night; but when I returned from New Orleans she covered me with kisses. I always think she is not as smart as the rabbits, and certainly she has no "social intelligence" like they do - they understand a surprising amount of what I say and are very good at getting their thoughts across to me while she never communicates anything - but now and then I wonder if she is secretly brilliant. Perhaps her name should be changed to "Houdini" (she came with the name Sylvia, after her previous owner's prickly professor) since she can escape from anything. And I mean anything. She has gotten into, out of, over, around, and through (?) all manner of barricades, cages, and blocked-off entryways. When she first came into my house, Cashmere was terrified of her although she is a fifth of the size of the rabbits, so I kept her (or tried!) in the back half of the house. Forget it - Sylvia would not be denied her freedom to explore every, and I mean EVERY, inch of my house. She likes to hide under things, and it's amazing some of the spaces she has squeezed into!

I always joke that Sylvia is the bratty kid sister who follows the bunnies around and does whatever they do, which is certainly true as far as the litterbox goes - if they decide for some reason that some patch of the carpet suits them better, she does too. (Which is very annoying since their little pills are easy to clean up, but hers is like miniature dog stuff.) And she is a diva. Once when I was doing the dishes, I heard a blood-curdling, ululating scream right behind me. After I got over my shock, I looked below the stove and found Sylvia sitting beneath it as happy as could be. Maybe she felt ignored...?

Perhaps the strangest stunt she has pulled is the Mealworm Breeding Program. The local pet shop has been unable to get mealworms, which are Sylvia's favorite treat, for months now. I thought she would be disappointed, but apparently she saved one and started a breeding program in her cage (which she hardly uses herself) because one day I found all sorts of them in there, and an adult bug as well. Argh! But I collected them and now she has mealworms to last until the dry spell is over.

Watch this space for video footage of Sylvia getting stuck in a sock or a toilet paper tube (if she will fall for it again), trying to turn herself over, and running. That is never not funny!

Famous Hat