Ester's Feathers

New worldly possession!

As I am quite house-poor, I have had to curtail my eBay addiction almost completely, but lately have been sort of sticking my toe back in the shallow end. And voila! Chicken alarm clock. The alarm apparently doesn't work, but that's fine: I would probably have a heart attack if I was jolted awake by something metal and loud. Since you asked: I wake up to moonbeams. Or rather, a Moonbeam clock, which is made of faux bakelite and flashes light for several minutes and that usually does the trick, as I'm a ridiculously light sleeper. If that fails, then it deploys the audio version, which is not so gentle. The head of the chicken (on the clock) bobs up and down to the second hand (I know!). I'm sure there is some profane application of the same technology out there somewhere. And last night as I was just laying on the couch, reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (love it), I could hear the faint tick tick tick of the clock and it was actually very soothing. Like the beat beat beat of a heartbeat.

More Adventures in Poop! courtesy of Dinsdale. Yesterday, first thing in the morning, he left a dollop of it for me to step in and then walk around spreading. I ended up having to bathe him AND shampoo the carpets. Today I drove the stupidly long distance between me and my vet to drop off a sample of said poop, which came up negative for parasites, so now I have to put him on baby food. Sigh.

Yesterday I had a brief conversation in the comments column on Flickr with a local woman who had posted pictures of her visit with a capybara (above: giant rat, if you must: I prefer giant hamster) and I have to tell you, I am smitten. Like I don't have enough sturm und drang with my existing critter family. I fear I don't have the proper amount of space for them to cavort, and it sounds like they need a pool to swim in. I could wrangle a smallish pool but I don't think that would suffice. I dunno. They're pretty damned amazing, but I think I'll wait until Lulu sluffs off this mortal coil before seriously looking into acquiring a rodent who can get up to 150 pounds.