The apartment I moved into is the first floor of a house that only has one other apartment/tenant in it, directly above me (ie, i have the first floor, she has the second). She is also a gardener and regularly cares for the nicely groomed landscaping around our house. Well, when my ferrets are out and playing, Noodle, Easel, and Friday (heretoafter and in all my subsequent posts referred to as the Group of Ferrets Known as NEF, or GOFKNEF) have easy access to climb up into the main living room window and hop around on the sill. If I've only opened the window a few inches, a favorite game is to climb up to the top of the screen between the screen and the glass. This usually makes me yell something unprintable at them, or something useless like, "You'll fall! Get down!" which, of course, because they understand English perfectly and always obey me, they do. Actually, they've never fallen, and they love this little sandwich game, or whatever it should be called. Anyway, back to the story. So, while my housemate and her friend were out watering the bushes directly under this window, Noodle climbs onto the sill to look at them. He was pretty happy, because they were making weird water noises and staring at him with looks of total amazement on their faces. So Easel decides to get in on the action and see what's up, and the ferrets get even happier, because both women's eyes pop out of their head. One goes, "There's another one! Are they ferrets?! How many does she have?" At this point I wander over to the window to talk to the poor women, despite the fact that I was more alarming-looking than the ferrets (pre-shower, still in pajamas). I figure I'll talk to them before they think the house is infested by giant tasmanian vampire rats or something. As I chat with them amicably, Friday climbs up and decides to amuse them even more. I swear, ferrets are never more pleased with themselves than when people are boggling at them. Noodle looked like he'd gotten to eat a cat. In other news, Noodle has decided that a crumpled-up wad of cardstock is his new toy. He just carries it around ceaselessly, except when he sticks it into a bag, and then he sits there in the bag with it. Doing what, I don't know. I couldn't even PRETEND to guess. We're an all-wood-pellet household! Yeah! Bobo the cat even took to them with a minimum of griping. I hope my housemate doesn't wonder why I've got over 200lbs of wood pellets in our shared basement. Note: if you're going to use wood pellets for cats, you should only use a 1/2"-1" layer in their pan. They feel a bit better about it that way. At least, i HOPE Bobo has taken to the litter pan. Oops. I hope she's not planning on surprising me sometime. Friday continues to do well and to climb up onto Potpie's cage and get stuck. If anybody ever read Richard Scarry books (themselves as kids or to their kids) and remembers the short story where the goatherd had to climb a mountain to rescue a cute girl's cow, the expression on the cow's face is EXACTLY what Friday looks like when she's up there. The expression on my face is that of the goatherd's the third time he has to climb and get the cow. Favorite current toy of all three: well, toys. One, a thick plastic bag that they ripped off of one of my vinyl albums. Second, a bagel-sized bag that's too small for one ferret, much less three, so of course all three have to try to get in there. Melissa ___ Melissa Litwicki __ [log in to unmask] ___ By the whole newsgroup devoted tennis showing it after scarfing fork and laughters [Posted in FML issue 2059]