Bob, so glad to hear that your dad has rallied! Those times are special extra gifts to us. Okay, for Christmas I got an unbelievably sexy gift from Steve: a Nikon Naturescope, a 20x little scope designed for fieldwork. It is a marvelously designed little thing. Tonight Meltdown was tired so I put her bed on the table and used a 20 watt little halogen light on the side to provide the lighting (in lieu of using up the battery) and to keep her tail warm. She let me study her tail for over half an hour! Unlike Warp's fur (which is albino, and which I saw only in fast glimpses) and our hairs (blonde, chestnut, gray, and white) a number of Meltdown's silver colored ones (She is mostly gray.) look to be partly transparent. Since she's mostly bald on her tail since having a (removed) malignancy of the L adrenal years ago I really got to look closely at skin and at blackheads and the like. Here is what I noticed: 1. white heads tended to be sites with ingrown fine hairs which were noticeable at 20x magnification 2. the orange ones tended to be fresher oily secretions which usually accompanied an erupting or very short fine hair; when the oil was carefully rubbed off the hairs were there and were firmly anchored 3. black secretions appeared to be older and more dessicated, often without any associated hairs; when hairs were present they were usually loose and sometimes completely out of the skin, and sometimes were wound tightly in the secretions; often there were also flakes of skin involved in the black ones, too 4. it was possible to see much of the length of the shafts since they ran at a pronounced angle under the skin I'll have to try using a moisturizer (which has helped in the past whenever any of our's have blackheads) and see what changes I see in the breakdown of the secretions, easy freeing of hairs, and wicking of oils. Oh, at one point I yelled out, "Steve, please come in here; I want to compare your nose and Meltie's tail." He declined, but one day I'll take out the stage and compare. Yes, I also looked at her ear wax and saw no mites. BTW, she's doing well enough that we have put a ramped litter pot back in her cage. (Of course, with her form of cardiomyopathy she may be too unwell for it again in a few hours or a few days, but for now she's very happy with it.) Melissa mentioned runny noses with excitement. Ruffle had a chronically runny nose (to the point where she learned to blow into a handkerchief on command) and whenever she got to do favorite things outdoors she would just drip all over. It was not from allergies because we could take her on the balcony and she would not reach that level of intense sniffing and joy, and just not drip all over, but if she even saw that we were about to open the front door while she was in our arms she'd be watering all over before the knob even turned. She used to leave a wet little drip trail. Sukie [Posted in FML issue 1797]