Hi FML!  This is Firedog Elizabeth, babysetting the Pooping Horde while
dad, better known as Bob C the punster, is sleeping off the end of his flu.
I had to promise to give bug juice to the Horde once an hour.  I don't know
what's in it, but knowing dad, it might actually HAVE bugs in it!  He once
did a project on eating grasshoppers, and actually caught a bunch and
roasted them like the Pauite did, and then ate them.  He is always doing
stuff like that.  When he was writing a paper on pemican, he drove to a
buffalo farm and got about a ton of buffalo bones and meat, then stopped at
a motel for a couple of days to make the pemican.  He must have gotten in
trouble, because he said the owner was about to crack HIS bones for their
marrow from all the noise he was making!  Then he actually ate the smelly
and greasy stuff!!!  Yeech!!!  He says its a perfect food, but I tasted it,
and I would rather eat fish, which I hate.  And last night, he was talking
about making roasted fish head soup from a Chinook recipe he found that
dates from God knows when, but needed to find a place to buy giant fish
heads.  Would somebody please help me?  I pick up ferret poop.
 
Goodness but a lot of people wrote to me after tattling on dad a few days
ago.  Most wanted me to tell really juicy stuff about dad, but if I did, I
would never get to drive his little red car anymore.  Well, maybe just this
one time, but if I don't get to drive the car again, I'm blaming all of you!
 
Dad has had a really bad flu all week and has actually been sleeping a lot.
He has insomina or something because I've never known him to sleep more
than a few hours a night.  But this week he has been sleeping a lot, maybe
6 or 7 hours, which drives him crazy.  He is building a new model ship.
He builds them piece by piece, just like the real boats were built, and
takes months to build them.  He gets crazy about this just like when he is
working on prehistoric food.  When he worked in Israel, he came home with a
huge box of papyri so he could make models of the reed boats.  He even made
cloth from the reeds for the sail.  When he built his model of Darwin's
ship, he built it stick by stick, just like the original.
 
Now dad is building a bunch of Native American boats and has the stuff
all over his library.  Last night he was tieing real buffalo skin to what
looked like a wicker basket, and the ferrets where going nuts over the
scraps he was dropping on the floor.  A tiny piece of fur would fall down,
and a dozen ferrets would wrestle over it until one would run off with it
in his mouth.  Usually a couple of other ferrets would be close behind, and
the wrestling would start all over again.  The sticks were considered a
prize as well.  I think dad said they were willow, but I am not sure, but
everyone wanted one.  A couple of times Lady Noir would leap on dads lap
and make a dash for the wicker thing or the buffalo skin, or Tui would just
leap for the skin from the ground.  Boy can he jump!
 
Dad took a nap, and I went to bed thinking I was safe.  Sometime in the
middle of the night, I awoke to a loud shreaking noise.  It was the smoke
alarm!!  I grabbed my robe and ran to see if dad was alright.  He was in
the middle of the room, waving a towel over his head in circles.  Even
though the ferrets also have the flu, they were dancing around, thinking it
was a great game.  Being that I just graduated from fire school, I could
recognize the smell of burning wood, and the foot of smoke was another good
clue something had gone on in the library.
 
Dad was blushing, waving this towel in circles and a dozen ferrets were
dancing and falling all over the place.  Then there was this big crash and
a smoldering log fell from dad's desk to the floor, followed by a black
streak!  It was Carbone, who climbed up to the desk and pushed the log to
the floor.  Now 19 ferrets could not be kept out of the smoldering hole
that dad had burned into the log.  Tori, normally with long pure white fur
was now a sable!  Smoke was everywhere, the alarm was blasting away, every
ferret in the house was digging soot all over the floor, and dad was waving
a dirty towel over his head like someone trying to flag down a UFO!
 
It seems like the crazy guy was making a dug-out canoe the old fashioned
way and he got a little carried away with his blow-torch.  I don't know
what a blow-torch has to do with an old fashioned way, but I guess I was
lucky he didn't start a campfire!  I went back to bed thankful he hasn't
decided to build a model of a nuclear bomb.  No body better tell him where
to get giant fish heads, either!!!!
 
Elizabeth, Firedog and temporary pooper picker upper
[Posted in FML issue 2623]