Today, I enlisted a few friends to help greet a new shelter baby named Snoball. Snoball is still a youngster and could have been very confused when he arrived. So we had all our bases covered per request of his mom. I put Bandit to the right of the bridge and I put Ferri-lu to the left. I stood in front, and all the ferret shelter babies were invited to come if they wanted to. We had quite a little turn out for him, mostly ferrets from Snoballs shelter. When he finally arrived, Snoball seemed invigorated coming over those wooden planks. But he also seemed a bit leery. So I ran up to him, gave him a big ole sniff, and introduced myself. He just blinked and stared at me for a minute. Then he saw all the others giving nods of assurance behind me. A big smile crept across his face as he looked around at all the fields of flowers, ferrets, butterflies, bubbles, and everything he loved for as far as the eye could see (or the nose could sniff). He pranced around saying over and over, "where's my wings, where's my wings." I said, "Well their right on your back silly!" He looked over his shoulder and couldn't believe where there was once nothing there were two big somethings. Before he could ask about a halo like we were all wearing, he gave a sly smile, and rolled his eyes upwards to find a shiny, gold, twinkling halo. Oh he was spiffy I tell you! Spiffy and ... famished. So we cheerfully hopped on over to soup valley where there were bars of soup saucers, troughs of soup, waterfalls of soup that ended up in soup lake, and finally the big soup bowl! This guy doesn't fool around, okay? He went for the gusto. The big soup bowl. We all had some licks, and then finished up. But he wasn't done. So we laid down, groomed ourselves and waited. Still he wasn't done. Pretty soon, we were all fidgety, looking around at each other, and tapping our toenails. He still wasn't done. So that's when Bandit and Ferri-lu broke out the Texas Hold'em set and started up a poker game. But he still ate. I don't know how to play poker and things so I just watched the others. Some of the ferrets had to leave so they could curl up in a cotton ball cloud for a nap, others had to leave because of more important business like, swatting at butterflies or playing in ball games. Sometimes, we'd all take our attention off the game, look over at Snoball in unison, then shake our heads and continue on without business. We finally forgot about lil' Snoball for a bit when we heard a big, big, burp! It reverberated among the clouds and shook us all over. Shocked, we looked over to where Snoball was, who wasn't so "lil'" anymore. He was on his back, one paw draped across the top of his stomach, two back legs barely sticking out of the monstrosity that was now Snoball. I ran over and said, "Snoball! Whudju do?!" He looked over at me with a drunk look and said, "NOW we can tour the place." My paw smacked the top of my forehead. This guy! So Bandit and Ferri-lu dropped the game and scouted out a wagon. We rolled Snoball onto the wagon and with the help of some others, we rolled off to tour Rainbow bridge. The first place I showed him ... treadmill lane. Sandee [Posted in FML issue 4752]