Old Hat Family Photo

Ma and Pa Hat sent me this old family photo, which hopefully they don't mind me posting on this blog. I'm not sure of the date of this, but it would be from the late 70's or the very early 80's. Can you believe two such blond kids could be of partially West African descent? I love the outfits Ma and Pa Hat are wearing, especially their pants. And notice our guinea pig Jennapig featured prominently on my lap. She was the first creature I ever saw go from young and vigorous to old and frail.

Famous Hat

Charlie and Cashmere: Happy Day!

In my goal to create The Most Random Blog Known to Mankind, I have recently neglected what used to be my two favorite topics: Abortion Is Evil and My Pets Are Cute. Today I will focus on Favorite Topic #2 and bore you with more little animal stories. Yesterday was a happy, happy, happy day for Charlie and Cashmere (and Sylvia!) because Allie and Aimee the guinea pigs left. They went home with someone from the Lutheran choir who was very happy to get them. I will miss them, because they were very snuggly and a lot of fun to watch run around, but they were also loud (especially in the morning, when they wanted breakfast) and they drove the rabbits nuts. Charlie and Cashmere just watched in amazement as my choirmate cuddled the piggies, decided she could get along with them, and left with them. Even Sylvia made happy little squeaky noises I've never heard her make before as she ate her dinner.

Here's a true story: the Mideastern band I play in does not have the most reliable drummer, so before one important gig they kept him hostage at the keyboard player's house until we all got in the car to drive to the gig, in a town about an hour south of here. After we had driven for quite some time, the drummer finally asked me in confusion if we were going to another town. It turns out he thought we were going to a street in our city by the same name as this town, so he must have been very confused when we got in the car and drove and drove and drove! He probably thought we had kidnapped him and was wondering where we were taking him. Crazy Americans! I will say that he is an incredible drummer.

Sorry, no Lenten reflection today, but I do have a picture of a lamb. (Unfortunately it looks more Christmasy than Eastery!) This is a little lamb my mother made out of my favorite flannel shirt when it got too worn out. Unlike me, my mother can sew anything.

Famous Hat

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

Famous Hat

(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.

Famous Hat

No Guinea Pig Update, But Plenty of Cookies!

For anyone who was hoping for an update about the guinea pigs I was supposed to acquire last night, their current owner decided she didn't want to venture out into the snow. So instead I went to Hardingfele and Tailor's house and baked cookies. You see, in some sort of fit of insanity I had agreed to be part of the cookie exchange at work, which would be fine except that I am the opposite of a domestic goddess. (Would that be a domestic demon or a feral goddess?) So I made the following offer to Hardingfele: if I supplied most of the ingredients, let her have some of the cookies, and threw in dinner as well, would she help me bake the cookies? I needed FOUR DOZEN, which sounded like an intimidating number. Hardingfele said sure, so I stopped by the neighborhood grocery store to get flour and eggs and then drove through the snowstorm to her house.

Dinner was catered by a local Mideastern restaurant. (No, I did not order it; I scrounged leftovers from some meeting they had at work.) Mm, spinach phyllo squares, pita bread, feta cheese, and some kind of dessert that was phyllo dough wrapped around rice pudding custard! Hardingfele supplied the wine, and Tailor supplied the entertainment with the story she had to write for her homework. (She is a very good writer.) Then we began the cookie baking.

I had originally wanted to make an elaborate sort of cookie my mother used to make when I was very small, but which even she had given up on by the time I was ten or so. It involved making a butter cookie dough with bits of chopped-up candy cane in it, dying half of it red with food coloring, forming it into little snakes, and braiding a red and a white snake of dough together to form candy cane cookies. Labor intensive, yes, but I figured with three of us we could easily do it. However, it turned out that for that type of cookie dough, you were supposed to chill it for an hour before forming it into shapes. We didn't have that kind of time to waste, so we went with Plan B: drop cookies! You can do just about anything with that kind of recipe, for example, chocolate chip cookies. That didn't seem sufficiently Christmasy, and more importantly, we didn't have chocolate chips, so we made orange cranberry cookies. Hardingfele provided the orange extract and cardamom and donated the craisins, while I put in a sprinkle of clove powder I had hauled along with my other ingredients (including brown and white sugar and vanilla extract). I had forgotten my butter, so she had to donate two sticks to the cause, and in exchange I gave her vegetable oil and four eggs. Then we baked the cookies, and we had four dozen in no time! We let Tailor throw random things in the last batch, since those were for her, so they were orange cranberry M&M cookies. Finally we sampled our experiment, and they were delicious!

This means tonight I don't have to worry about baking for the cookie exchange tomorrow. I only have to worry about making something for the Holiday potluck and getting a gift for my Secret Santee. No wonder they say the holidays are so stressful!

Famous Hat

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