Dear Ferret Folks- Today, my husband and I are both sick. Last weekend we invited both of our little three year old nephews over to our house for a sleep over, and one of them (Richard) left a little something behind. Is it SARS? The Bird Flu? The Black Death of Europe? (I never got this sick when I had Norway Rats, but I deny EVER having had fleas!) Little Richard's button nose ran and ran. We finally gave him his own private roll of toilet paper to tote around because I just couldn't stand watching him wipe his nose on his Spiderman shirt. The little guy's upper lip was so red and raw he looked he had a mustache, sort of like a toddler Hitler. He was miserable. And now I am miserable. This morning I let Ping and Puma loose to run around. I keep them in their cage at night when I can't monitor things. The rest of the time they are pretty much free to do what they want. (Someday we will build a ferret room on this new house. Until then, we are all making do.) I made a pot of coffee, and shuffled into the bathroom to do the sort of thing that people do in places like that. I was sick. I was tired. I was seated. Ping, ever chipper in the morning, decided to climb up the legs of my long underwear and explore my lap. Now, on a normal day I would have punted him into the laundry basket for this transgression of my privacy and my person but I was sick. I was miserable. I was literally, too sick to fight back. Ping stood on my thighs and walked his front paws up my belly and chest, sniffing. I looked down and there was that happy, happy face. "Good morning! I'm climbing on you!" I moaned a little. "Go 'way." Ping did not go away. Ping dug his front claws into the fabric of my long underwear top and heaved himself up to my shoulders, walked across the back of my neck. "Go 'waaaay, Ping." Ping did not go away. Instead, he happily inserted his pointy head into the fall and tangle of my long hair, and immediately became stuck in it. So he had to thrash around a whole lot. I had to reach both arms over my head and grab him, try to extract the ferret without snatching myself bald headed or strangling Ping, which didn't sound like a really bad idea at just that moment. It had a raw sort of appeal that I am not at all proud of, but not yet having had that first cup of coffee might have had something to do with it. I finally brought Ping around to hang, just inches from my face in my two hands. He looked up at me with that relentlessly cheerful expression, back legs sprawled at right angles to his belly. "That was so much *fun*, hoomin, let's do it again!" I sighed deeply and finally did what I should have done in the first place, gently tossed him into the pile of laundry on the bathroom floor. Should have. But I was Too. Sick. To. Fight. Back. I've got a mammogram in a few days and I wonder what the technician is going to make of the crosshatching of small scratches over the top of my shoulders. I'm a pirate and that's where I keep my parrot? My partner and I are into S&M and we use a travel sized pencil-slim cat-o-nine tails while we are on the road? I'm a homeless person really into fitness, so I do my yoga poses over the steam grate I live over in the winter? I will never tell. Alexandra in MA [Posted in FML 5546]