I know, I know, I havn't updated this thing since forever; I seem to have a nasty personal rule of "one site at a time".  Once I get into creating/re-vamping/updating a site, I'm really into it but tend to neglect my other pages.  At the moment I'm working on a *major* "re-vampination" of my bird site, so this one's been getting neglected!
    In any case, updates: I now am caring for, besides my own rats, a fair number of Julia's.  She took Percy and Spot, but left me with some of her babies: Bronze, an albino female, Ophelia, a black female, Sunface, an albino male, and Livingston, an agouti male (who is at the moment running loose in my room).  Plus Shine, a black male, whom I wouldn've taken anyway.  Later this week she's bringing me the litter's father, Jake, along with a large double-decker cages... Which *almost* makes up for her suckering me into caring for all these guys!
    Shark, my big female mouse, had another litter; I have no idea by whom, though??  It seems to be the last males she was anywhere *near*, were the boys from her last litter, and I made sure to remove them well before they could cause the pregnancy.  So I have no idea??  In any case, they're not old enough to tell the colors/sexes yet.

    Sept. 29th

    Did I mention I seperated the ratty babes?  Looks like I did.  The girls are in a cage I "created", which isn't a bad cage; it's about 24" x 16" x 12".  What it is is a large Tupperware-type storage contained, with a wire lid I made; it's a nice cage, easy to clean, light-weight, and pretty well ventilated.  It's a good size, too; it wouldn't be large enough for a larger litter, but it's great for my four girls.
    Speaking of the girl ratties, Genevieve had herself a bit of an adventure; before I put them in the new cage, she managed to sneak out of Toni and Ashra's cage; I was pretty worried there for a while, but found her yesterday, curled up next to the cage.  She was fine, but had a few toenails nipped; must've been climbing on the wrong cage.  They're healing well; I'll keep an eye on them, keep them clean and make sure they don't get infected.
    I havn't *actually* updated this thing in a bit; that is, I've updated it but not actually uploaded it onto the net.  I'll do that when I'm finished here.
 

    Got the gerbs!  Actually I got them on the 22nd; see the Gerbils! page for more.
    Both pregnant female mice had their litters; but total tally is 0?  There's no babies in there.  I assume one of them must have eaten both litters.  Ew.  Truthfully I'm not too disappointed; I'm disgusted, but not disappointed.
    Caught another female mouse; another dove self satin, pretty young.
    Seperated the ratty babes... Um, what else?  Not much, obviously.

    Well, guess what?  I caught *yet another* pregnant female mouse.  This one's a PEW and looks to be due in the next couple days.  Yay.  Great.
    I bought another 10 gallon tank and put my baby male mice in there; my "boy cage" is severely overcrowded, and I put some of the smaller adult males in the 10 gal, too.  I ask again; anybody want some male mice?
 

    Well, my sister had an interesting experiance, yet again attributed towards mice and the catching of them.  She had been eating out of a box of Triscuits, and had managed to actually eat a few before she felt movement.  Woke me up out of a sound sleep to laugh at her and put the little mystery-colored male that had been snacking on her crackers in the boy cage.  Fortunately she was in a good mood, or I do believe I might not be here today. ;-)
    For those of you who cared about my cage dilemma, I took the rabbit cage, cut out the bottom grate (which was no easy matter), and used the parts that weren't completely mangled to make leval/balcony things in the cage.  All quite ingeniously of me, I might add ;-)  Ashra can miracalously squeeze through the bars (I was impressed!), and I assume Toni could, too, being the smaller rat, but I could put Jack and Billie in there, if nothing else.
    Speaking of Jack, we had a scare the other day!  I went in my room to get bird food, and didn't notice anything wrong, but looked over in the rat cage a few seconds later and Jack was laying on his back; I seriously thought he was dead, but when I reached in he moved.  I picked him up, and he seemed very dazed and weak; he gradually got stronger and now he seems like nothing ever happened.  I wonder what did???  It certainly gave me a scare.  He's getting rather old and I worry about him.  Of course, all the while Billie, who's considerably older than he, was bouncing around and trying to get my attention.
 

    Okay, just uploaded much of the site onto a geocities URL.  It had all been on my goplay account, but I also recently updated & revamped a bunch of stuff, and was beginning to worry that the small amount of disk space on my goplay account wouldn't be enough!  Geocities lets you have up to 11 MB, so I don't think that'll be a problem there!  The main problem being the pop-up windows, which bug the heck out of me.  Oh well, for free, who's complaining right?
    I left the entrance page on goplay for conveniance, and so all the webrings, links etc. that are linked to that page won't have to be changed.  Plus the URL there is so much more personal looking!  I also left the Little Critter Breeder Ring's site on the goplay account.
    Along with the webpage on geocities, I also got a new email addy, ratdragen@reocities.com, which I can also be emailed at although my primary email will no doubt remain avian@goplay.com.  I have a couple other emails hanging around the web (including dragonfuzz@goplay.com, which the site is based at), but those two are the main ones!
    In less technical news (yup that's about as technical as I get folks), the ratty babies are getting huge and ever so adorable :-)  And it looks like I have another mouse litter on the way - ugh!  A dove satin female I caught is now beginning to bulge noticibly.  What am I ever going to do with all these mice?!  Not that they aren't cute and all!  And I seem to have a preponderance of males (five adults, and 7 out of 9 babies)... Males being the harder to find homes for, of course.  Anybody out there want a whole bunch of male mice?
    I'm working on cage ideas for ratties.  I only have two cages, each 14" x 16" x 28"; one houses Jack and Billie (the senior cage), the other Toni and Ashra.  That's fine; I consider these cages big enough for up to 3 adult rats; but now I'm keeping Genevieve, probably Boomer, and very likely a rat from Julia's litter.  I have a huge rabbit cage sitting in my shed; it would work for the larger rats (bar spacing is 1" x 2", so no baby rats), but it's not a very nice cage, and has a grating on the bottom, which isn't good for ratty feet.  Or I could spend $40 or $50 (that I don't have and can't afford) on a brand new cage.  Dilemma, dilemma.  And one that you, the reader, probably don't care a bit about! ;-)
 
 
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