Actually, if a person is decent at making things and has a platform
bed that ventilates like ours does (my post that appeared on Sunday)
it would be possible to make a cage with top openings that fills the
entire space under the bed for hiding ferrets away during critical
times. Using the bathroom for romps is good also because closing a
bathroom door for someone's privacy is reasonable but it is still
best to be careful of timing because of scratching or other non-human
noises.

We only had to worry on the final year of that lease because earlier
the first super didn't care what anyone did. In fact, he did so little
himself that when we had a toilet stopped up on moving in (present
from the last tenant?) before we could buy a plunger it was almost
impossible to get him to even go to the repair room to lend us the
complex plunger. More importantly, the self-important assistant manager
who respected no one's privacy very much only arrived in the last year
of our tenancy there. In fact, he poisoned all the local feral cats at
which point we all got to have wild mice and some people (not us) even
got rats. He was a nasty piece of work and probably employed there only
because he was the owners' nephew.

Bridge greeters do important and constructive work. It's not really the
sort of thing that comforts me personally usually -- though I can think
of a few non-baby talk ones that did help me -- but it does comfort so
many others that I strongly appreciate that those people are helped. It
can't be an easy job either, dealing with all of that grief.

Also not at all an easy job is moderation. People who have not
moderated have no idea how hard it gets. One difficulty that people
don't expect is that you get to know who is abrupt, who is rough, who
is rushed, who stray too much from topic, and who otherwise can't --
or sometimes won't -- word things in ways that are kindest to others.
I know in my own case I've had some times -- and so have other FHL
Moderators in the past -- where the other moderators said, "Oh, having
this one appear could result in problems." and the one of us who
allowed it didn't notice because of being used to always having to cut
that person some slack compared to most posters. That gets like dealing
with a stretched rubber band in that it can be hard to tell how much it
has stretched until it snaps. In fact, difficult posts often inflict
the most pain on the moderators who have to decide and then have to
deal with all of the flack from people who disagree with them even
though they help those same people day after day, both the original
trouble maker and those who object. Besides the obvious selecting of
posts which are borderline (happens all the time in ways you would
never expect) or which can be read multiple ways (very hard to spot),
there are all of the clean-ups of posts to do when there are huge
quotes or other messes from the poster or from the poster's mail
provider, there are possible scams and possible dangerous "advice" to
try to check out, there are the private questions, there are things
to look up, there are bouncing addresses or ISPs suddenly blocking all
the mail, there are spammers, there are links to check, and there is so
much more. Every moderator does all of those things on top of having a
full life outside the list.

So, thank you, Bridge Greeters, current and past, and thank you, Bill,
for doing so much hard work, all of you!

Sukie (not a vet)

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html

[Posted in FML 6294]