Dear Ferret Folks- I have missed you, your fuzzies, too. I have been away for quite some time on a long, strange trip. That's why I've been so quiet. But, being me I have things to say about it all. First I went to Las Vegas for a few days. It was utterly bizarre. I kid you not, people even stranger than I am designed Las Vegas. I stayed in a hotel that looked like a giant black pyramid, with a huge fiberglass Sphinx wanna-be replica parked in front of it. Need a taxi? You catch it by standing under the faux-sphinx's enormous cat ass. Need someone to talk to? There are life-sized talking camels in the lobby that chatter nonstop, twenty four hours a day. Please, somebody else who has been to Las Vegas, back me up. I am not making this stuff up. Incidentally, I saw no issues of either Ferrets Magazine or Modern Ferret for sale while I was there. I found Charro while lost inside the Aladdin Hotel, (I wasn't looking for her, it wasn't some twisted personal quest of mine, she wasn't yelling "Coochie-Coochie!", thank god..), but found no ferritude whatsoever on the Las Vegas Strip. Then I went home and it got muuuuch weirder. My husband and I agreed to sit for a three month old baby while her family went away to El Salvador for a while. Like, two weeks. (It's a long story. Charro was not involved.) I get home from my Viva Las Vegas Experience and there is this little...person. I do not have any children of my own. Did you know that babies don't even use a CORNER PAN? You can't just put newspaper down on the floor for them. Know what's worse than driving in the car and your ferrets get loose while you're behind the wheel and they squeeze under the accelerator pedal? Grocery shopping with a baby. All right, all right, I can hear you mothers laughing at me from here. Yeah, yeah, get it out of your system. Laugh all you want. Ha-ha. Very funny. Living with tiny, demanding, toothless, incontinent people is a much stranger head-trip than the life-size talking camels by far. Oh, yeah. Amen. Know what a baby says at three in the morning while you are warming up her bottle in the microwave? I can't spell it, but it's really loud. You CANNOT distract her by giving her a nice plump raisin while she waits. Trust me on this. It is a pure pleasure to return to my normal routine and my FML. Ah, the FML! Hairballs! Dessicated liver recipes! Tacky Hammy contests! Flames! Things I can understand! I missed you guys. Alexandra in Massachusetts Switch: "Holy &^%$, Lily! What have you been digging in? The can says 'Baby Formula Enriched with Iron.' You've dug all the way to the bottom of it and thrown the stuff all over the kitchen floor, and all I see is this white powder...no iron. What does WAL-MART Price $22.79 mean?" Lily: "Hee-HEE!!" [Posted in FML issue 4049]