Hello fellow ferret lovers, As many of you know Ferrets Etc. has suffered severe financial blows the past few years. I have thought about closing the rescue many times, but everytime I see the ferrets sweet faces I can not bring myself to do it. This year will the 13th year I have ran Ferrets Etc. pretty much by myself. LAst year I made a plea to people and mainly the media to get the word out about our troubles. Unfortunatly the plea was not answered by the media. And the word did not get out to many. I scrapped along this year the best I could. Many of you know we were losing our home that we worked so hard for and wanted to raise the funds to save it. Well we did lose it, we had to sell it and now rent it back. It is heart breaking after working so hard to get this home. We now pay a rent that is killing us. Plus as many know Ferrets Etc. is the only rescue in the Denver Metro area and that has me overwhelmed. I recently went to the media again in hopes they would help now, but got the same answer "Ferrets do not matter to us or the public". Well we are going to lose living hear soon. In a nutshell, we found out my 5 year old daughter had petie mal seizures (abcesnse epilepsy) back in May and now we spend alot of time and money down at Childrens hospital. She is very brave , she has to have lots of blood draws and they are great there, they let her bring her one true thing of comfort with her, her ferret named snowbell. You add that on to my sons medical problems with his belly and allegries and my car accident 3 years ago I am still fighting on and in need of a sixth shoulder surgery it is medical bill hadies here. Well I knew Christmas would be bad for my children and ferrets alike this year and have been trying to deal with it. Between our rent and the raise in heating costs I can not make ends meet. And guess what my husbands job tells him right before Christmas they are closing the store, he will not have a job as of Jan. 28th. Merry Christmas to us!! We pray and hope you will he can go to a new store, but HomeDepot does not guarentee spots for everyone. Well at this point I am pleading again for help, this time asking people to hit the Colorado media with emails asking them to do a stroy on us. Maybe some wealthy person out there would like to help us save our home, the ferrets home. I have done this 13 years by myself but can not anymore. I am afraid I will be homeless soon and what will becaome of the ferrets? It is so scary. And my beutiful children who I love so much and who love the ferrets so much. I am non profit with the state but not federal. I never have found anyone to help me with how to do that or with the $250.00 it takes to get that status. My dream has always been to get a huge lot of land and open the only sanctuary in COlorado for all animals, thats why I named my group Ferrets Etc. the ETC> is for when I get the land and can save other animals. But right now I would just love to save my home and my rescue. Be able to tell my children they have a home and not make the holidays any worse for them. I v even tried to convince my landlord to donate the house to us but doubt that would happen. See we own half the home, but he bbought the part of the loan we defaulted on Ferretrs last year. So if we do not pay rent the home goes up for sale he gets the $150,000.00 owed to him and we get athing left from the sale. Anyway please spread the word. My mother even said try stars she heard on of the Hilton girls has ferrets. SOunds silly but who knows, anyone have any celebrity addresses?? :-) ALso I had to shut down my AOL account so our old email is gone until I can gets things running again and I pray I do. My mother let me start a screen name under her account for now. SO Ferrets Etc. is now at [log in to unmask] I like it , it stands for ferret rescue. Thank you to all who take a moment to listen. Stephanie Sheme [Posted in FML issue 5096]