4/25/2008

Subaru Ad

So, a photo of me with my Subaru is running in a Subaru ad in USA Today! An advertising person found the photo in my flickr account online and asked if she could use it. It's in a full-page ad with lots of pictures of people with their Subarus. Here is my picture:

4/08/2008

Pig Update

April 8, 2008

What’s new? Well, the guinea pigs are driving me nuts! They squeak all the time and chew on the bars of their cages and I don’t know what they want. I think they are just lonely. They really don’t eat much. When I bring them their veggies, they’re almost indifferent. And I only add pellets to their bowls about once a week. There is never a visible dent in their hay, so I’m not sure if they just don’t like hay much, or if the kind I’ve given them is gross. Here is what they are like individually:

Ginger is finicky. She will only eat a select few types of vegetables. She won’t eat zucchini, peas, broccoli, red peppers, cucumber, or tomato. She never finishes everything I give her. She won’t drink out of her water bottle anymore, so I have to give her water in a little dish. I got her this adorable dish that looks like a radish, but she’s already tipped it over once. She wheeks ALL the time, until she gets hoarse, so her wheek sounds like a parrot complaining. I think she’s lonely, but she doesn’t seem very happy to see me when I try to give her attention. She can get really frisky, and she gallops and jumps all over her cage like a little bucking bronco making cute little yips and squeaks all the while. It’s adorable to watch. Sometimes when she seems really antsy and frustrated, she humps her stuffed animal! When I put her with Freddie during floor-time, under STRICT supervision, she follows him and flirts until he starts chasing her, and then she gets all bitey and runs away. She’s a total tease! She doesn’t seem to be getting very big, and I’m starting to think she’s probably not pregnant.

Freddie is getting HUGE! He’s already over a pound, and he gets cuter with every day. He has really dark soulful eyes. He’s quieter than Ginger, and much more laid back. He wheeks far less than she does. He’s very shy and reserved, but has a sweet nature. Whenever he gets anywhere near Ginger, he automatically starts purring/rumbling. I think he just has a huge crush on her. He drinks a lot of water, and eats more veggies than Ginger. He usually finishes what I give him, but he’s picky about cucumbers and broccoli too. I usually give him her leftovers. Even though he seems much sweeter than Ginger, he does bite me when I pick him up and carry him. I think it’s because he’s scared, and I hope he doesn’t keep it up as he matures.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with them. I was planning to get Freddie neutered so that he and Ginger could be together again, but the stories about neutering scare me, and it’s expensive. So then I thought maybe I could find someone to trade one of mine for one of theirs so that I’d have two girls or two boys. But there are no listings for guinea pigs anywhere in Idaho, and it would be difficult to find that ideal situation even if there were. So, now I can’t decide.
“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”
-Jerome K Jerome

Amusing sentence from an article from an online news station:
"DeJesus confessed to stealing from an apartment inside a brownstone on East 13th Street in the Village and admitted he burblarized another home on East 11th."

Pigs!

March 25, 2008

So, one of my guinea pigs started rumblestrutting the other guinea pig, which means that she was doing a mating dance. They don’t have names yet, but I will call them Pinky and Ginger for the sake of this story. Ginger was doing some weird behavior like rubbing her butt on the ground, and then Pinky would come by and smell it like it was roses, and then she’d go over to Ginger and start making this really sweet rumbling-gurgling-purring noise and wiggling her butt back and forth (rumblestrutting). And she kept following Ginger and doing this dance and sniffing her butt. I thought it was kinda funny, as I’d heard that sometimes female guinea pigs do this with each other. The next day, when I saw that it was still going on, I decided I’d better have a look at their little privates just to be sure they are both girls. I looked, which was difficult because they scrabble around a lot, and they looked pretty much the same, so I was satisfied. As the behavior got more aggressive, I decided to look online at pictures of boys and girls just to be absolutely sure. And sure enough, if you look reallllly close, Pinky has a little tiny penis. So, I panicked and quickly built a second cage and stuck Ginger in there. As soon as I separated them, they started wheeking loudly and have been very upset ever since. I talked to Henry about it, and we decided that we need to get Pinky neutered so that they can be together again, because they miss each other and hate to be alone. If Ginger turns out to be pregnant, we’ll deal with that hurdle when we come to it. So I called an exotics vet in Twin Falls, and he said that we would have to wait to neuter Pinky until he’s three months old. Now, I’m just not sure what to do with them until then, because they are both very lonely and upset, but I certainly can’t put them back together until after he’s neutered. And then of course there’s the pregnancy issue to deal with as well, if Ginger turns out to be pregnant. I don’t want to get them same-sex friends to keep them company, because who knows how many babies Ginger could have if she’s pregnant? Two pigs are really all I have space for at the moment.