2011 Mammal Report

Oh man hamsters.

We got us a dang zoo around here. Seriously. I believe I already mentioned the fish, and it was a long, long time ago, but I think I've only updated once since around mid 2003, so it's probably only a few "older posts" clicks back. There have been may changes in the fish situation, and even changes in the bird situation, but I'm a mammal, and with that bias inside of me, I'll hit those first, and tell you peoples some other day about everybody else, hopefully before the cockatiels all die of old age.

I would have said something about them turning gray, but well...

CATS:

Oh Jesus, the hind feet.

Diabetes didn't kill Dusty Rhodes, and an old priest and a young priest never showed up to kill Crackhouse, so they're still around. Since last we spoke, Dusty has pretty much kicked all his glucose issues in the ass, mainly through the power of Fancy Feast. So the positive is that we no longer have to jab him with needles several times a day, and the negative is that if we ever get raided by the cops, they're going to see a giant box of unused syringes and assume the worst. Dusty is pretty much the snuggliest and best cat ever, which serves as a stark contrast to Cracky, who remains a cat full of hate.

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

She's so cranky and insane and evil that somehow, it made a full loop around back into these being endearing qualities. This cat is so awful that it went beyond awful and did that thing really old video games did where you walk off one side of the screen and end up on the other. and her awfulness somehow became adorable. Also, she lost one of her fangs somehow, (my theory is that it's embedded somewhere in Dusty's flank) so she's all snaggle-toothed and drools in her brief moments of happiness. I love my cat.

Dorp.

Thirdly, there's the newer cat, Panda. One one hand, with her bizarre floppy body, foot pad hair-tufts, and creepily bent tail, she's basically the most physically adorable cat to ever exist. On the other hand, she is dumb - dumb as hell. She leaps into windows face-first, slides around on her big, stupid feet, treats laundry hampers like toilets, terrorizes small animals, and has this stupid, psychotic urge to chew the hell out of any tortillas she can find. Dusty likes her, though.

HAMSTERS:

A rare photo of some of our caged pets that isn't fully just a blurry picture of an animal behind perfectly-focused cage bars.

Also, we have these two Roborovski hamsters here. If you're not the world's last 56K user, you saw them in the video at the head of this post, and that's basically what life is like with two of these, except with slightly less Motorhead. On runs and runs, the other tries to get on the wheel, and eventually someone falls. I think hamsters are one of the rare cases of an animal that's commonly kept as a pet where even people who are overly enthusiastic and make websites about them and suchlike will tell you that they're all basically all a bunch of stupids. But they're like little cotton balls with eyes and Sam Elliot mustaches, so they can get away with it. They don't actually have names, because we gave up on trying to tell them apart maybe five minutes after we got them home.

RATS:

FUCK YEAH WATER

Finally, there are the rats. I had wanted rats for a long, long time, and was seriously getting them sometime around 2004, before I spent all my money paying Hell Roommate's bills and before her cat gave birth to Cracky in my closet. Finally, Sarah got a bigass cage as what I can only assume is a pretty nontraditional Valentine's Day gift, and shortly after came Poppy and Scrambles the Death-Dealer, followed eventually by impulse-rats Punky and Snickers. (I named at least one of these rats. Try and guess which one. Take your time.)

OH MY GOD I LOVE WATER

Poppy was pretty much damaged goods when we got her, missing the ends of a few of her fingers, and she has this weird little crimp in the end of her tail. The end is all loose and floppy, and we figured it would fall off eventually, but it's been over a year, and it's still there. She's normally shy, probably as a result of whatever led to her having mangled fingers and tail, but she's becoming crazy in her middle age, so she might randomly hop around for no reason or try to gnaw off your finger because she thinks it's made of yogurt. Good times.

Basement Rat lurks in the shadows.

Punky is what's known as a Dumbo rat, where someone found a genetic mutation and selectively bred the shit out of it until there were a whole bunch of rats with huge, low-set ears that all looked like Feivel from An American Tail. Being a Dumbo also means that she's bigger than the other rats, (or at least was until recently) and will alpha-rat out on them from time to time. What I'm saying here is that she will try to humble them the way they do in old country and hump them silly, even though she lacks the parts for proper humping. I never thought I'd ever make a post on here that included the phrase "proper humping." I better stop before this gets all lurid. But yeah, aside from the non-consensual lesbianism, she's all sweet and cuddly and loves to ride around in your pocket.

Please excuse the desk.

Snickers is the newest rat, and the only one without the hooded pattern that pretty much every pet store rat has ever had. She's what you apparently call a Berkshire rat, which is a monocle-wearing way of saying solid-colored with a white belly. Aside from that, she's goddamn huge, even bigger than Punky. Seems to be pretty timid so far though, and Punky is improperly humping her as I type this, so I don't think she's going to try and get all dominant any time soon.

Post-op Scrambles on the comeback trail.

Finally - and this is the "current events" part - there's Scrambles. All humping aside, she's more often than not been the alpha female of the group, and is the most outgoing and energetic of the original three. In most ways, she does live up to her name. Well, as in the scrambling part, and not the "giant killer hurricane from a cartoon about death metal" part. And she's the smallest of all of the rats, except that changed for a while in the last month or so. First, she started looking a little chubby, which was adorable, because hell, chubby rat, you know? But then, shit got real.

She kept getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And it became really apparent that something was messed-up inside her, because a fat rat gets fat everywhere, and this looked like she had swallowed a damn baseball. After a lot of freaking out, doing hella Google searches and getting worried that she either had cancer or a condition called megacolon that's not as funny as it sounds, (although it does sound pretty funny, for real) and is just as much as a "time to euthanize this here rat" condition as cancer, we finally lucked out and found a vet in town that handled things other than dogs and cats. And the vet knew her shit to the utmost and was able to tell use within a couple seconds of picking Scrambles up that she was going to need surgery, and that her uterus was full of something and had to come out. So on Monday, they cut my damn rat open.

The surgery didn't make her head all blurry; that was just my camera.

You might not think a rat can handle surgery, but they actually seem to kick ass at it. The wound you see up there, while still pretty gnarly, (And speaking of gnarly, she actually has stainless steel stitches, which I'm totally asking for, next time I butcher myself) is nothing compared to the puffy red thing she had going on about a day earlier. And man, speaking of puffy red things... The problem in her internal baby-making apparatus ended up being what the doctor referred to as "cysts on top of cysts," and was just fucking awful. I declined the offer to look at the actual mass they pulled out of her in person, but the vet's cellphone picture of a passed-out Scrambles next to that thing was fucking gross. It was pretty much as big as she was, and was like this big, gnarled-up, bloody ball of terror. It looked like they had pulled Hitler's soul out of her. Words alone cannot fully describe the picture I saw, but Google Image Search and some artful cutting and pasting I did should give you the general idea:

Basically this, spread out on a towel.

As of right now, she's doing fine, eating, drinking, sleeping, and crapping the same as always, and should be headed back into the big cage with the others sometime in the next day or so, bringing the rat squad back to full strength. As for me, I'm $135 poorer, but I still have my rat, so it's all good.

Awwwwwww.

Now, we just need to figure out a way to get some dogs and Guinea pigs in here somehow...

Hey guys

HARD TIMES

"He put hard times on Dusty Rhodes and his family. You don't know what hard times are daddy! Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work. They got four or five kids and can't pay their wages, can't buy their food. Hard times are when the auto workers are out of work and they tell em' go home. And hard times, are when a man works on a job thirty years, THIRTY YEARS! They give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say hey a computer took your place, Daddy! That's hard times! That's hard times! And Ric Flair, you put hard times on this country by taking Dusty Rhodes out. THAT'S HARD TIMES!!"

- Dusty Rhodes (the wrestler)

Hard times are when Dusty Rhodes has to seemingly pee out half his body weight out to get rid of all the excess glucose, but the urinary tract infection keeps it from happening so easily.

Seems like ever since we took in this cat, all I've been hearing from people is how sweet a cat he is. "Oh, isn't he a sweetie" and such. And I suppose this is true, in the definition generally used to describe Feline Americans. Dusty is pretty much the most laid-back, loving cat I've ever been around; he doesn't mind being picked up, he runs to the door when he hears it opening, and he even comes running when you call his name. It's always seemed that he is a creature born into the diabolical and devious body of a cat, but with the pure soul of a dog. Doesn't matter who or what you are, to Dusty the cat, you're all pretty much alright by him.
Thing is, the more scientific reasoning for him to be termed a "sweet" cat is because his bloodstream has so goddamn much sugar running through it. It all started kind of innocently. One day you notice little things, all, "say that cat sure does eat a lot." "Say, he sure drinks a lot of water." "Wow, that's the second time we've had to buy litter this month." At first, you chalk it up as some weird character flaw or some cute little thing he does. Then, you wonder if he hasn't stopped growing yet, and that you might have some sort of 75 pound cat-beast on your hands someday. But once we found out what the deal was, it wasn't weird, or cute, or funny. It fucking sucked. Dusty started lazing around a lot more, even by cat standards, and the intake and output of fluids escalated from curious to impressive, and finally to absolutely frightening. After things progressed to rapid weight loss, we finally figured out that something bad was going on and took him to the vet. And on August 28th, right around the same time another Dusty, Dvoracek, was being pronounced out for the year for the fourth straight season, Dusty Rhodes (the cat) was officially diagnosed with feline diabetes.
As of right now, we're a little over a week in, and it's been an uphill struggle, to say the least. Dusty's been up and down, behaving almost like the July 2009 version of himself for a while, then laying down under the table for an hour with a sad look on his face, followed by drinking water as though such a thing were about to be made illegal. We've had our own struggles as well, fudging up his first insulin injection and going through about five of the little lancet thingies you use to poke a hole in his ear to get one little blood sample. (For use on a glucometer, by the way, which was provided for basically nothing by some fine folks who have made it their thing to help out broke-asses like us who have found ourselves as the owners of sugarcats.) But we're getting the hang of it, (Or to be more accurate, Sarah is, because she's been doing most of the work relating to cat illness. I did do the dishes the other day, though.) and Dusty's in relatively good hands, I would say.
On the other hand, I'm really starting to lose faith in our vet. My inner cheapskate already had doubts when the neutering bill came to $280-something, (It only cost about $70 to spay my other cat at a different vet, and that's a wayyyy more invasive operation) but lately, i think my problem is this weird pathological thing the people up there have with always having to be right, while we always have to be wrong. When Sarah first took Dusty in and inquired about the diabeetus, the immediate response was "well, I had suspected that," I guess hoping that no one would think to go, "then why didn't you test him a month ago, asshole?" Today, after a pretty scary episode last night where Dusty's blood glucose reading was 440 before his shot and 360 after (what you want is something in the 100-200 range, and there shouldn't be that huge a difference within an hour or so) and Dusty seriously squatted down and peed for over five minutes, until the litter actually couldn't hold anymore liquid and the stuff just pooled up around him, the vet was called again. And rather than concern, Sarah was greeted more with hostility, being all but condemned as a charlatan and a fiend for such a sin as home blood testing, and the machine itself was immediately deemed "wonky" and inaccurate. Mind you, this is a week after they sent us home with about six photocopied pages about why it's important for people with diabetic cats to test at home, but why should they let a detail like that get in the way of a good opportunity to make someone feel bad? And when Sarah raised concerns that Dusty's insulin dose was too low, the vet seemed to immediately suggest that such an idea was so wrong, so insane, that they'd more than likely end up actually decreasing his dosage when all was said and done. Furthermore, the excessive peeing was attributed to excessive drinking, which was attributed to diarrhea, which was in no way related to insulin or glucose, so we were wrong again. You know, aside from that whole thing where diarrhea is pretty much a basic symptom of feline diabetes getting out of hand, which I guess they figured we didn't know, because they had just assumed we don't have the internet or can't read or something like that. Needless to say, we were sent home with instructions to increase his dosage of insulin, and with the vet kind of looking like an ass.
Anyway, Dusty's got a ways to go before he gets back to something truly resembling normal, but he's relatively fine now, and he was kicking it on the corner of the bed behind me, but he took off somewhere, because he actually moves around now that his shots have been closer to what he's actually needed. I'll update you, the internet, on any future developments, and someday, I might even update this damn thing with something other than an update on all the dang animals around here. We did just get a hamster though, so I promise nothing.

R.I.P. Dusty's Rhodes's Balls

So yeah, yesterday, we took the new cat to the shop to get his sexy parts removed. It came in at a cost of roughly $231 more than any previous cat neuterings I had known of had cost, but eh, Dusty's a good cat, and worthy of only the finest in ball-removal. He was pretty much wiped out for most of the day yesterday, but he's back to normal now, albeit a few grams lighter.



Meanwhile, Crackhouse still don't cotton to him none, so she's getting the run of the rest of the house, while Dusty stays locked up in here. We gotta try to get her claws capped pretty soon, but that's a terrifying proposal, so we're dragging the shit out of our feet on that one.



Meanwhile, there's fish-related goings-on, but first, a horrifying look into the world of the currently fishless 14-gallon tank. (Once again, R.I.P., two nameless otocinclus catfish) The other day, along with pulling out two fairly large Argentine swords (or were they Amazon swords? Or was one Amazon and another Argentine? God damn it.) for use in other tanks, (more on that in a second) I trimmed out this much dead plant material, plus a few handfuls more that went either in the kitchen or bathroom garbage cans:



And after all that, the damn thing still looks like this:



Off the top of my head, that's got one (massive) Amazon sword, one Argentine sword, three dwarf lillies, one absolutely goddamn gigantically huge aponegeton, (when I pulled it out to trim it, it was a good three feet from root to leaf tips) and an assortment of aponegetons and an anubias (I think that's what it is) tossed in as reclamation projects from other tanks, past and present, that don't have whatever sort of voodoo plant-growing magic that this tank has. Gotta be something in the water.

But yeah, the big stuff. Sarah finally got a couple of her underwater friends over here from the old homestead in Ada.


First, there's this five-gallon tank, featuring Boris the crowntail betta:



This picture doesn't really do him justice, because he is the goddamn craziest-looking fish I ever saw. He looks like something from one of those old 80's heavy metal album covers, all flying through the sky with lightning around him. Like he's something Dio would have to sword to death in a music video.



Yeeeeah. But anyway, he pretty much acts like he looks. He is like GODDAMMIT: The Fish. Like all he does is thrash around and eat worms and HATE. It is insane.

But the real coolness is this; a scheme that Sarah hatched months before we were all chillin' up in the same crib, but has finally come to fruition, with the addition of her two gallon tank and my shelves:



THE BETTA SHELF. Constructed from a bookshelf, three two-gallon tanks, one of those grow light things from Walmart, a handful of screws and tacks, and a chunk of that black cardboard backing that used to be attached to the back of the bookshelf. A finely tuned engine of animal husbandry if ever there was one.



On the left is Picasso, my damn-near year-old regular veil-tail betta, who's shown up in a few posts before; just scroll down, because I update like once a year, so if I last spoke of him in September, it should still be on the page. He has a little bulldog-face and is awesome.



On the right is Maurice, (The Fightin' Frenchy) Sarah's half-moon betta she picked up here a while back. He's awesome and looks like a watermelon under certain conditions.



In the middle is a brand-goddamn-new fish that Sarah got me as an early birfday present, Rufus. That's not a really good picture of him, because he's turned hella-pink ever since we got him out of that cup he was in, but I'm tired of messing with fish photos, so that's what you people will have to live with. But yeah, you better listen to this dude, because he knows what he's talking about. And remember to wind your watch.



In other news, I got an absolute shitload of photos and happenings over the last few decades that I've been meaning to throw up here, but never have. If I can ever figure out how to add one of those "click to read the rest" links to a post, I'll do some sort of massive clearinghouse sort of thing. Until then, I'll leave this with no explanation:

Monorail Cat

...Realizes that she has made a terrible mistake

New Cat

I can has cheez?

So yeah, this cat was all hanging around outside the new place, so we took him in, named him after Dusty Rhodes, (the wrestler, not the baseball player who apparently died a few days ago)
and in a week, we're going to have his balls cut off. Good times. Right now, he's kind of splitting his time between hanging out in the bushes outside and hanging out in the bedroom inside. The outside part is because we still don't know if we can trust him to not spray everywhere, and the bedroom sequestering is because A, we can't trust him around the bird, and B, because we can't trust my original cat around the new one. See, while this cat is all snuggly sweetness and such, my cat is essentially Death Metal: The Cat, so while Dusty seems to take an, "oh hey, you're a cat. I'm a cat too, let's hang out" approach to her, Crackhouse's feelings toward him are more of the "SLAY THE USURPER" kind. Hopefully, she can get used to him, but until then, he stays locked up in here, getting fed small pieces of cheese.

Here is this.

DO NOT WANT

(Might want to turn the volume down)

WHAT IN THE EVERLASTING NAME OF HELLING DAMNING SHIT IS GOING ON HERE

AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH



AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHH