Yesterday we took a trip to a local hardware store (looking for woodstove pellets; no luck), only to find htat it's going out of business and everything in the store was 30-60% off. Came home with linoleum (lots; $0.84), linoleum tiles (12; $3), a new poop-scraper, and, perhaps most important, three large bags of mulch. We had a pair of ferrets arrive in a 50-gallon reptile tank once--ages ago. The tank wasn't in great shape, had no lid, and the plug for the hole in the bottom was gone. So we were stuck with a large glass box. For the past several months, it's been a toybox, with shoes and balls and things in it; the ferrets get in and play with stuff. Now it's a large glass box of dirt. I used the corner of a linoleum tile--the self-sticking kind--to plug the hole in the bottom, then just dumped in mulch. I also buried a couple of their favorite plastic tubes. Oh, happy ferrets! And I figure if they ever get tired of digging, we have a very nice flowerbox... Oh, and one other thing: the self-sticking linoleum floor tiles don't stick to metal at all. So they're really not the best bet for lining the sheet-metal bottom pan of a cage. <sigh> I put in too much mulch, of course. They're getting dirt all over the place. But they're SO HAPPY. Jen and the Crazy Business http://home.maine.rr.com/tesseract [Posted in FML issue 2863]