Dear Ferret Folks-
 
I had some real moments of frustration this weekend.  I had four teenage
house guests.  My brother Sam, nineteen, and three of his buddies, one
of whom was a girl buddy.  They came down from their *very* fancy
photography school to work on a project, photoessays of abandoned
Victorian mental institutions.  We have a lot of those in Massachusetts
for some reason.  Great, gray, Gothic buildings with turrets and towers
and shuttered wings.
 
This was a great idea in theory.  In practice, the kids wanted to SLEEP
half of each weekend day, instead of drive around seeing the sites on
their list.  On saturday I let them do that, thinking "well, I'm not
their Mommy.  Let them be boneheads and get an 'F'." On sunday morning,
though, the situation was worse.  Not only did I wake up to discover that
they had crept back into the house in the wee hours after pulling an all
night party in Boston (forty five miles away), they had MULTIPLIED!!!
There were now FIVE, not *four* collapsed college students sleeping it
off in my house.  Three (fully dressed, mercifully) in the guest room
pull-out sofa bed, one on the living room sofa, and a NEW one curled up
in the dog's chair!
 
Now, as it happened, I recognized the new guy in the dog's chair.  Kevin,
my brother Sam's best friend from Boston University.  Just how and why
Kevin was in the dog's chair, and not in his dorm in Boston I was too
polite to ask.  I was nineteen once.  These things happen.  Anyway, they
were out cold, all of them.  And it was nine thirty in the morning.  They
only had so many hours to visit the rest of their sites, and make the
veeeery long trek back to Rochester NY, where they went to school.  And
SOMEONE was going to have to get Kevin home.  Grrrr.  I had had enough.
 
I spoke with my husband, and he reported that he had told them all to
get up twenty minutes before.  They had made sleepy noises, and gone back
to sleep.  Well, I decided it *was* time to be Mommy, all right.  I have
no children of my own, but I used to be a High School teacher, and I know
some things about herding teenagers.  They were *not* prepared for it
when I went from kid to kid, and *shook* each one bodily, and explained
that they were getting up NOW.  The guy in the dog's chair looked like
he had swallowed his tongue.  The kid on the sofa said pitifully "I'm up!
I'm up!" as in "DON'T HURT ME, I'm up!" The woman in the pull out sleeper
bed bounded out of bed, leaving my brother (six foot three), and another
six foot plus tall teenag in that bed.  Those two guys tried that crap
about hiding under the blankets, and pretending they didn't hear me.
 
Wrong answer.
 
Ve haff means at our disposal for such peeeople....My husband simply
went into the ferret room and brought out Ping is He, whom he deposited
directly on the BED.  Ping sniffed the two guys and decided they were
no fun, so he jumped onto the floor.  The *girl*, who had wisely gotten
her *ss out of the bed when I told her to got an evil grin on her face!
She scooped up Ping and deposited him BENEATH the blankets that the two
layabouts were hiding under.
 
Oh, the screams!!  The screams were music to my ears!  Blankets were
thrown!  Pillows hurled!  Two ENORMOUSLY TALL young men flew from the
guest room as though persued by Al-Queda, a Gattling gun, and the ghost
of Jimmy Hoffa!  A few seconds later, Ping is He, standing all of five
inches tall trotted out of the guest room looking *really* puzzled.
 
Alexandra in MA
[Posted in FML issue 5089]