Dear Ferret Folks-
 
My husband Dann and HIS ferret Switch the Kit (Sabrina is mine, she has
fewer issues) have been having a war for a few weeks now.  They are
locked in mortal combat over, of all things, rubber work shoe insoles.
Neither one will give an inch.  It is maddening.
 
Imagine if you will the following scene.  It is late in the
Sargent-Colburn household.  All of the lights have been turned off for
the night.  The occasional piece of electronic gadgetry emits a soft
glow, little LED lights shine like so many hi-tech red and orange berries
in the darkness.
 
But there is something moving in the stillness.  It is Switch the Kit.
She sniffs her way along the baseboards, slithers under pieces of
furniture.  Finally she comes to the forbidden pair of work shoes lined
up together on the living room floor.  She pours herself into the first
one like a grey mist, and scratches-scratches-scratches until she can get
her claws and teeth into the edge of her rubbery treasure.  An insole!
 
It it all hers, hers alone, and must be stashed without delay.
 
Switch crosses the living room floor to her favourite stash spot in three
or four joyous leaps, her treasure held firmly in her mouth.  A moment,
and there!  It is safe.  She returns to collect the second one.  She
lingers over this one, stops to chew its firm, yet deliciously yielding
underside, all the while enveloped in a cloud of smell reminiscent of
clean, bright pink pencil erasers.
 
Hours later, my husband emerges from our bedroom in the dawn's half-light
to discover that his work shoes have been tumbled upon their sides, and
the insoles have vanished.  Again.  Just as they have every day for the
past ten days.
 
I will spare you the bellows of primate rage that emanate from my
otherwise reasonable husband.  The howls, the curses.  The threats he
levels at the well-being and security of a certain weasel as he wrestles
the furniture aside to get at his insoles.
 
Dear Ferret Folks, this scene is played out in my home sometimes twice a
day.  Sometimes it ends with a weasel being bopped on the head with the
recovered pair of insoles.
 
Me, I vote for not leaving the work shoes on the floor anymore, but I am
over-ruled.  Loudly.  I suggest that Switch is too dim-witted to change
her behavior, so the change should be made at the top of the household
food-chain, not the bottom.  I am overruled even more loudly.
 
Does anyone out there remember the Falklands War in the 1980's?  England
and Argentina hauled out the big guns to fight over a few wave-washed
specks of land known as the Falkland Islands right off of the Argentine
coast.  The Argentines called them the Malvinas.  Sheep live there.  And
seagulls.  They are thousands of miles from the English who control them.
 
Carriers were sailed over to the Falklands.  Shots were fired.  Angry
words were exchanged.  Embassies were put on alert.  An exocet missile
was launched.  The sheep were scared, and all the seagulls flew away.
Someone described the conflict as "Two bald men fighting over a comb."
 
That's about what's happening here.  A weasel who wears no shoes is
fighting for cushioned insoles, while the canny primate refuses to accept
that the weasel is too stupid to change its ways, and thus he refuses to
change his own.  All the while, the insoles are becoming more and more
tattered.
 
Please send combs.
 
Alexandra in Massachusetts
[Posted in FML issue 3870]