We spent the evening building a massive....THING for our three (THREE??? THREE??? Four months ago we were FERRETLESS...) fuzzies. It's really impressive. I gotta brag. We had one three-level cage, with a door on front and one on top. We bought another identical cage, and cut a hole in the bottom and made a ramp to the top level of the cage underneath. So now it's six levels of ferret heaven...with three doors, five feet tall, three hamocks, etc. We need to put carpet on the wire on the top three levels, but other than that it worked out great. We are proud. Our power tools have served us well. We had to cut the wire with our Christmas present roatary tool, and then squeeze and bend all the sharp edges around so they were smooth. Then, as we were cleaning up, there came a horrible scream from the cage. Simmie the littlest had caught her front foot in the mesh on the very bottom floor where the litter boxes are and had ripped one of her claws clean out. (!) It bled amazingly for such a tiny foot...and her feet are easily a third of Malone's feet...we washed it up and put some medicated powder on it, and then gave her extra loves and kisses and some ferretone licks off her belly. Silly ferret...three minutes later, she was back on the first level, digging at the boxes, favoring her injured paw. This is the second claw she's ripped out.....I feel bad for her little feet. We have all of the cage carpeted except for the level with the litterboxes, because they tend to, well, miss sometimes, and it's so much neater to fall through the cage and not get ground into cage carpet. But her feet are so tiny they slip right through.....poor ferret. Also, Malone had his 2nd distemper today. No problem. He rode to the pet store to get Nora-the-greyhound's coat in my pocket. Sweet thing. AND we got 16 feet of dryer tubes. What fun! What fun! What a ferret day; I'm exausted. Laurel _________________________________________________________ ** "You don't like those ideas? I got others..." --Marshal McLuhan ** Laurel Gilbert [log in to unmask] American Culture Studies, BGSU, Ohio http://www.bgsu.edu/~lgilber/ [Posted in FML issue 1457]