Hi FML! This is Firedog Elizabeth, babysetting the Pooping Horde while dad, better known as Bob C the punster, is sleeping off the end of his flu. I had to promise to give bug juice to the Horde once an hour. I don't know what's in it, but knowing dad, it might actually HAVE bugs in it! He once did a project on eating grasshoppers, and actually caught a bunch and roasted them like the Pauite did, and then ate them. He is always doing stuff like that. When he was writing a paper on pemican, he drove to a buffalo farm and got about a ton of buffalo bones and meat, then stopped at a motel for a couple of days to make the pemican. He must have gotten in trouble, because he said the owner was about to crack HIS bones for their marrow from all the noise he was making! Then he actually ate the smelly and greasy stuff!!! Yeech!!! He says its a perfect food, but I tasted it, and I would rather eat fish, which I hate. And last night, he was talking about making roasted fish head soup from a Chinook recipe he found that dates from God knows when, but needed to find a place to buy giant fish heads. Would somebody please help me? I pick up ferret poop. Goodness but a lot of people wrote to me after tattling on dad a few days ago. Most wanted me to tell really juicy stuff about dad, but if I did, I would never get to drive his little red car anymore. Well, maybe just this one time, but if I don't get to drive the car again, I'm blaming all of you! Dad has had a really bad flu all week and has actually been sleeping a lot. He has insomina or something because I've never known him to sleep more than a few hours a night. But this week he has been sleeping a lot, maybe 6 or 7 hours, which drives him crazy. He is building a new model ship. He builds them piece by piece, just like the real boats were built, and takes months to build them. He gets crazy about this just like when he is working on prehistoric food. When he worked in Israel, he came home with a huge box of papyri so he could make models of the reed boats. He even made cloth from the reeds for the sail. When he built his model of Darwin's ship, he built it stick by stick, just like the original. Now dad is building a bunch of Native American boats and has the stuff all over his library. Last night he was tieing real buffalo skin to what looked like a wicker basket, and the ferrets where going nuts over the scraps he was dropping on the floor. A tiny piece of fur would fall down, and a dozen ferrets would wrestle over it until one would run off with it in his mouth. Usually a couple of other ferrets would be close behind, and the wrestling would start all over again. The sticks were considered a prize as well. I think dad said they were willow, but I am not sure, but everyone wanted one. A couple of times Lady Noir would leap on dads lap and make a dash for the wicker thing or the buffalo skin, or Tui would just leap for the skin from the ground. Boy can he jump! Dad took a nap, and I went to bed thinking I was safe. Sometime in the middle of the night, I awoke to a loud shreaking noise. It was the smoke alarm!! I grabbed my robe and ran to see if dad was alright. He was in the middle of the room, waving a towel over his head in circles. Even though the ferrets also have the flu, they were dancing around, thinking it was a great game. Being that I just graduated from fire school, I could recognize the smell of burning wood, and the foot of smoke was another good clue something had gone on in the library. Dad was blushing, waving this towel in circles and a dozen ferrets were dancing and falling all over the place. Then there was this big crash and a smoldering log fell from dad's desk to the floor, followed by a black streak! It was Carbone, who climbed up to the desk and pushed the log to the floor. Now 19 ferrets could not be kept out of the smoldering hole that dad had burned into the log. Tori, normally with long pure white fur was now a sable! Smoke was everywhere, the alarm was blasting away, every ferret in the house was digging soot all over the floor, and dad was waving a dirty towel over his head like someone trying to flag down a UFO! It seems like the crazy guy was making a dug-out canoe the old fashioned way and he got a little carried away with his blow-torch. I don't know what a blow-torch has to do with an old fashioned way, but I guess I was lucky he didn't start a campfire! I went back to bed thankful he hasn't decided to build a model of a nuclear bomb. No body better tell him where to get giant fish heads, either!!!! Elizabeth, Firedog and temporary pooper picker upper [Posted in FML issue 2623]