I ushered in the new year cleaning up ferret poop! I didn't mean to, but poop happens. Rebecca was upstairs watching a movie with her new boyfriend who looks like Christopher Reeve in his Superman stage, and Eric had been asleep at least an hour. I figured I would try to get the ferrets excited, since I obviously wasn't going to excite anyone else. Ergo, I waved the bedspread I keep for ferret blanky rides and started walking backwards around the wreck room dragging any interested fuzzies along with me. On the second pass, when Jake had wakened and joined Kermit and Muggsie and Eloise and Sabine, and when the bouncing and fighting was getting going in earnest, I realized I'd just dragged the blanky through a puddle of pee trickling away from a big pile of poop some bad animal had left near a carpet tube. Forgetting the time, I went for the paper towels and Simple Green I keep in the bar (along with laxatone, syringes, newspaper and other non-alcoholic ferret supplies). At about 3 after midnight I looked at the clock and decided to laugh. Crying was an alternate possibility, but I kind of like my life of ferret nanny so that didn't seem to make good sense. I'll be cleaning up plenty of poop in '98; I'll probably clean more poop from the same spot tomorrow. So what else could I do? I started the blanky ride again. Happy New Year! Judith [Posted in FML issue 2173]