Loved the Mayan Calendar joke. The Mayan Calendar had ages which came
and went and this December will mark the end of one age and the
beginning of another rather than the end of the world (even if that
is a profitable fiction for movie studios)

Anyway, three people knew the answer:
Katharine wrote:
>And I was around for a 10 year get-together at Disney World in 1997!

Yes, me, too! Steve and I might even still have a t-shirt from that but
I would have to check.

Kathy of the Ferret Nook, who also knew the answer added:

>Dec. 21, 19:14 1987 - the first FML entry
>Dec. 21, 2012 - the 25th anniversary of the FML

>The other day I found something interesting -- I was cleaning out some
>storage boxes and found to my surprise -- 3-1/2 inch floppies with the
>FML from its infant days! I'll have to dig out our old CPU and see if
>the floppies are still viable!

Gads! Don't tell the people who are new to ferrets of some of the
mistakes people used to make back then without even knowing they were
mistakes due to lack of information. These days people have resources
which did not exist when the FML began, so even people who had had
ferrets for a while typically had access only to two quite terrible
little hobbyist books on ferrets. The first ferret veterinary text did
not even exist till 1988 (and not sold till 1989) and was only 300 and
forty something pages long including the Table of Contents. Today,
people who care enough about their ferrets can get levels of
information that were only dreamed of back in the 80s, can find vets
who know far, far, far more than any of the vets did then about ferrets
and have ways to learn more, and can treat diseases that could not be
treated then.

For a very long while the FML and then also Ferret Central (when that
was not an antique) were the very best resources that existed on
ferrets.

A few of us also remember being on the sequential lists that led into
the formation of the FML by Chris Lewis. BTW, I can not recall how, but
I ran into Greg Lewis-Paley this year (or maybe last year, I guess) and
he said that Chris and Pat were doing well. Was it here? You know, I
think that it may have been!

Chris began the FML because the open list that pre-existed it was being
overrun by annoying types who kept posting fake nasty stuff like how to
slaughter and cook ferrets.

Besides Chris and Pat who had Nicia, Mocha, and Toby:
>List of Charter Members of the Ferret Mailing List:
> evans@mhuxt (Steve & Sukie Crandall)
> [log in to unmask] (Tom Danisavich)
> [log in to unmask] (Susan A. Musil)
> tjs@tropix (Timothy J. Spires)
> davis@utx1 (Gary A. Davis)
> alan@sequent (Alan Gardiner)
> [log in to unmask] (Leonard Bottleman)
> [log in to unmask] (Shu-Ju Wang-Burgess)
> [log in to unmask] (Janet L. Crow)
> mnetor!uunet!vsedev!FMPMIS!scott (? - mail was mostly garbled)

At that point we had Hjalmar and Fritter which means that by then we
had already lost two ferrets, but that make sense since we have had
annual NJ permits for something like 31 or 32 years by now, and one
of those ferrets was from a fur farm and came to us with bad health
problems from that background so was short-lived while the other was a
breeder who had been retired at something like age 4 when a mounting
male bite through one of her eyes with a canine so we periodically
would have to travel 4 hours each way to get to her veterinary
ophthalmologist.

Later, Bill Gruber provided the first anonymous option while Chris was
still list owner and moderator because there were so very many FFZs
(Ferret-Free Zones, i.e. places that banned ferrets), especially before
the rabies vaccine work and the CDC work on how rabies behaves in
ferrets.

Afterwards Bill became the FML owners and moderator for the vast
majority of its existence.

We all owe him a LOT! So many thanks, Bill, for all that you do for
people and ferrets pretty much every single day of the year (with only
a handful of days off in all that time).

And going down the list of the replies brings up full circle to the
Mayan joke with Carol's reply:

>The answer would be the founding of the FML, and it will be the 25th
>anniversary if the world doesn't end on December 21.

I guess we will get to see if December 21st brings a new age.

Sukie (not a vet) Ferrets make the world a game.

VERY GRATEFUL TO BILL GRUBER
FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS
OF WORK ALMOST EVERY DAY
 
AND GLAD CHRIS LEWIS BEGAN THE FML

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferrethealth.msu.edu/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html
all ferret topics:
http://listserv.ferretmailinglist.org/archives/ferret-search.html

"All hail the procrastinators for they shall rule the world tomorrow."
(2010, Steve Crandall)

A nation is as free as the least within it.

[Posted in FML 7632]