Dear Ferret Folks- I missed you last night. I missed you, because I had something wonderfully ferrety and silly to share, and I don't have many ferret appreciators to share it with. So I'll share it here, and let's see if all hell breaks loose again. If so, I'll just place a set of rabbit ear antennas on my head, and wrap the whole thing in foil to protect me from negative thoughts. Not a tin foil hat, a tin foil *helmet*. I told you that my ferret Todd, also known as "Chunky Butt" is a big boy. A very big boy. He is one of the biggest Marshall's ferrets that I have ever seen. And he spent months in a small cage, eating. Just eating and sleeping. There were no toys in that cage. By the time my husband brought him home he was the size of a badger. I often say that Todd is not a ferret, he is a badger because of his size, and the fact that he has a reverse badger thing going on. Instead of having a dark face with a white badger stripe running up from his nose and between his eyes, he has a dark stripe instead in a white face. He is a very dark fellow, with dainty white toes. He is beautiful. It makes me happy just to say his name, because I remember my friend Todd Leuthold, and remember how much he loved his ferrets, loved his daughter, loved life. And my Todd has a chunky butt. No two ways around it. Even after a few weeks here with lots of free roam time, he still has a chunky butt. He no longer looks like a loaf of bread trying to war dance, but he is is still a big boy. He has grown into his dance, learned grace and the joy of running, the joy of jumping. And he has learned about butter. Yes, butter. Todd loves butter. I keep a stick at room temperature in a small plastic Tupperware dish. I don't keep it on my big kitchen island anymore, because I kept finding Todd bellied up to it, eyes closed in perfect bliss, licking the butter and making that face that they make when they are licking up sticky vitamin paste. You know the one. It's perfectly ridiculous. I grew up in a house where it was a perfectly normal thing to find cat tongue prints in the butter. When guests come, you turn the stick over for politeness sake. But I draw the line at mustelid prints in the butter. More to the point, I don't want young Todd to develop coronary artery disease from his butter addiction. I moved it to the other end of the counter. He found it. I left it near the stove for a while, but them I baked bread, forgot, and moved it back to the kitchen island. Todd found it. There he was again, licking, licking, licking, eyes squeezed tightly shut in weasel bliss. I tried moving it to the inside of the refrigerator. Then I had to remove Todd from the inside of the refrigerator. Again, and again...and again. I gently detached Todd's face from the butter, and took the butter away again and set the butter back beside the stove, where he can't get it. Ferret? Cant? These words don't go together. I really should know better. Last night I had my five year old nephew Alex over to spend the night. I took the big cushions off of the yellow sofa, and unfolded the guest bed. We make it a habit to look under the mattress whenever we do that, just in case some ferret has left something unspeakable under there. Well, my husband looked. And under there, glowing with its own pale yellow light was...half a wrapped stick of butter, the paper gently dimpled with fang holes. And on the open end, a pattern of small tongue lick prints that reminds me of the way a chrysanthemum holds its petals. A butter blossom. No, Todd is not a chunky butt. He is a *butter* butt. Alexandra in MA Readying the Reynolds Wrap [Posted in FML 6122]