Dear Ferret Folks- I had some real moments of frustration this weekend. I had four teenage house guests. My brother Sam, nineteen, and three of his buddies, one of whom was a girl buddy. They came down from their *very* fancy photography school to work on a project, photoessays of abandoned Victorian mental institutions. We have a lot of those in Massachusetts for some reason. Great, gray, Gothic buildings with turrets and towers and shuttered wings. This was a great idea in theory. In practice, the kids wanted to SLEEP half of each weekend day, instead of drive around seeing the sites on their list. On saturday I let them do that, thinking "well, I'm not their Mommy. Let them be boneheads and get an 'F'." On sunday morning, though, the situation was worse. Not only did I wake up to discover that they had crept back into the house in the wee hours after pulling an all night party in Boston (forty five miles away), they had MULTIPLIED!!! There were now FIVE, not *four* collapsed college students sleeping it off in my house. Three (fully dressed, mercifully) in the guest room pull-out sofa bed, one on the living room sofa, and a NEW one curled up in the dog's chair! Now, as it happened, I recognized the new guy in the dog's chair. Kevin, my brother Sam's best friend from Boston University. Just how and why Kevin was in the dog's chair, and not in his dorm in Boston I was too polite to ask. I was nineteen once. These things happen. Anyway, they were out cold, all of them. And it was nine thirty in the morning. They only had so many hours to visit the rest of their sites, and make the veeeery long trek back to Rochester NY, where they went to school. And SOMEONE was going to have to get Kevin home. Grrrr. I had had enough. I spoke with my husband, and he reported that he had told them all to get up twenty minutes before. They had made sleepy noises, and gone back to sleep. Well, I decided it *was* time to be Mommy, all right. I have no children of my own, but I used to be a High School teacher, and I know some things about herding teenagers. They were *not* prepared for it when I went from kid to kid, and *shook* each one bodily, and explained that they were getting up NOW. The guy in the dog's chair looked like he had swallowed his tongue. The kid on the sofa said pitifully "I'm up! I'm up!" as in "DON'T HURT ME, I'm up!" The woman in the pull out sleeper bed bounded out of bed, leaving my brother (six foot three), and another six foot plus tall teenag in that bed. Those two guys tried that crap about hiding under the blankets, and pretending they didn't hear me. Wrong answer. Ve haff means at our disposal for such peeeople....My husband simply went into the ferret room and brought out Ping is He, whom he deposited directly on the BED. Ping sniffed the two guys and decided they were no fun, so he jumped onto the floor. The *girl*, who had wisely gotten her *ss out of the bed when I told her to got an evil grin on her face! She scooped up Ping and deposited him BENEATH the blankets that the two layabouts were hiding under. Oh, the screams!! The screams were music to my ears! Blankets were thrown! Pillows hurled! Two ENORMOUSLY TALL young men flew from the guest room as though persued by Al-Queda, a Gattling gun, and the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa! A few seconds later, Ping is He, standing all of five inches tall trotted out of the guest room looking *really* puzzled. Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML issue 5089]