Well, the cardboard thing was a bust. Koosh decided it was food. For a smart ferret he can be a little dopey.

Our Modern Ferret Store has a new look. Eric's also working on our Ferret Trading Post web site. Trying to make it more appealing. Also, we just added a new product -- the Ferret Planet Security Cube -- that we designed. Our ferrets loved the prototype. It's nice and dark inside.

Blah, blah, blah.

Oh! My friend Logan, who went to college with, got a story published on Gothic.net. You can look it up by the author: L.L. Soares. I lost the URL. It's a horror story called "Little Black Dress." There's a little explicit language and situations that aren't suitable for youngsters.

I'll tell you about the book I'm reading some other time ...

Earthquake?

There was an earthquake in Manhattan last night/early this morning. I’m a little surprised I didn’t feel it, but then, it wasn’t very big and I’m kind of far away and on a separate island. It must have been terrifying for New Yorkers.

One of my creative writing professors in college told me that there’s a fault line in Manhattan. He said it was running down 42nd St. Now, I don’t know if that was just something funny to say or if there’s really a fault line. But Manhattan has had little earthquakes before. Not good, considering that the people aren’t prepared for earthquakes and neither are the buildings. At least out in California, they build things to allegedly withstand earthquakes. But in NYC? Nope.

Ferrets

Today we put together this cardboard playhouse that we’ve had in its box for several years. We just never got around to putting it together. They don’t make them anymore -- at least I think they don’t. It was a guy in Florida who designed them and maybe even cut out the cardboard stuff. The playhouse is supposed to be several floors, each with a tunnel in it. It was a bit of a pain in the ass to put together -- and we were too concerned about not being able to access a ferret who might fall asleep or get stuck or two ferrets fighting inside it -- so we only did two of the four floors.

Gabby went from one side to the other on the bottom floor, but hasn’t figured out that you can go up. She wasn’t all that thrilled (though I’ll be she’ll like it when she figures out she can go up). Trixie did the same thing, but since Trixie’s more laid back, I suspect it might have been too exciting for her. She came out of it and went immediately to her favorite clear thru-way tube. Koosh was -- miraculously -- able to get in and go from one side to the other, but I don’t think he’d fit to go up to the next level. He came out and climbed Cauliflower’s cage (meaning: “I want to sleep with Cauli now”). He curled up and is cuddled with his brother. Finally, Balthazar woke up and decided to take a look. He was the first one to the top! I always knew he was smart. But I’m not sure if he could figure out how to get back down again, so I took the top off and took him out of the playhouse. He didn’t go back in -- instead he made me get on the floor and play with him with the clear tube. (We have a game we play together -- He goes into the tube and I run my hand across the tube so it makes a noise. Then he runs out the other end of the tube, dances, turns around and races back into the tube for another go.)

That’s Not A Dust Bunny!

The other morning Eric and I got out of bed around the same time. Eric was walking into the bathroom and I was still in the hallway when I noticed a round black thing on the floor near the wall next to the bathroom door. Eric paused to watch me cautiously approach the black thing.

“I think it’s a hair doinky,” he said.

[A “hair doinky” is commonly known as a ponytail holder -- you know, those elastic things covered with cloth or terry.]

My eyes were still foggy and that hallway is a little shadowy, so I couldn’t really focus on the black thing. Eric went into the bathroom. I went into the kitchen to get a flashlight so I could get a better look at the thing.

On closer inspection, it wasn’t just black. It had some brown tones to it. I immediately thought that it must be a living thing -- it was that kind of brown and black combination you see in fur. But it was a black round thing; I couldn’t figure out what it could possibly be, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to touch it.

Eric went back to bed. I turned on the computer in the living room, looking back at the black thing every minute or two. I fully expected it would start moving.

It did.

I called to Eric that the round black thing was alive. He (bravely!) came out of the bedroom to look. It was a two-inch long very chubby wide fuzzy worm. It was too fat to be an ordinary fuzzy caterpillar. It gave me the willies. I’m shuddering now as I write this; that’s how much fuzzy worms freak me out.

This is where the story turns sad for the round black thing, now a long fat fuzzy worm.

I got the dust broom and pan from the kitchen. We got it at Ikea. It’s a freestanding dustpan -- the yard-long handle is perpendicular to the pan, so the pan acts as a base, and has a notch to hang the broom on. I gave Eric the dustpan, and he put it in the path of the fuzzy fat worm. The worm wriggled onto the pan, and Eric dumped it into the toilet. He flushed. Twice.

Halloween Bear

We have a wooden chainsaw-cut bear sculpture on our front steps. We like him. Now he’s dressed for Halloween.

Whole Bear

Close-Up Bear

Marc Morrone

Our friend Marc Morrone from Parrots of the World and the Martha Stewart Living show has his own show on the Fox Network! Here in New York (NY-Metro Area), it’s on channel 5 from 7-7:30 AM Saturdays. One of the episodes that will be on will feature Tiffany Taylor and another will feature me! I’ll try to find out when those will be on and let everyone know. Check your local listings. Remember it’s the regular Fox channel, not Fox Family or FX.

The ferrets are shedding and getting chubby. Soon Cauliflower won't be able to get his big butt over the gate by the front door. That's good. We'll be able to use the gate when he's out instead of having to close the door.

We got a "costume" for the chainsaw-carved wooden bear on our front porch (I think you'd call it a porch) -- nose glasses (you know the ones -- they've got furry eyebrows and a moustache). It's very silly. Eric took pictures, but he still hasn't shown me how to convert them into something I can put up on the web. Maybe later.

I wish I could say that I'm doing something interesting, but I'm not. I want to lock myself up and write, but that requires the world to leave me alone for a few hours, which it's not inclined to do. Instead I do laundry. Maybe today I'll manage to find a quiet spot.

The world has changed again in just the few past days. The anthrax scare has me concerned, not because I think Modern Ferret would be a target, but because I wonder what the possibility is that mail batched with anthrax-containing envelopes might be a hazard. This is not a good time to be a mail-order company.

More changes in an already sad world -- a dear friend of mine has lost her daughter to pancreatic cancer. I know how it breaks her heart. There are no words. It makes me think of how sad my grandmother must have been when my mother died. The brightest and the most beautiful are the hardest to lose.

Another friend’s father died the other day. We talked about it a few days before that. She brought up the idea that she would (and now does, I presume) feel like an orphan after her father died. Sure, she’s an adult with a grown son of her own, but both her parents are gone. I’ve felt that way since sometime after my mom died coming up on 28 years ago -- when my dad dies, I’ll be an orphan. Granted, I’ll be an adult orphan -- and surely I have plenty of family members who love me -- but it’s still an odd feeling of being left.

Then, I heard that someone I’d graduated high school with just recently lost his wife to cancer. Very sad.

With all that, October 28th is the anniversary of my mother’s death.

October is a very sad month.

---

I don’t mean to be so down. This mustn’t be very enjoyable to read. I should find something more upbeat to talk about.

Here’s something: Trixie has become a real cuddle-ferret. She’s always loved being held, but now she seems to enjoy it more. Or maybe she realizes I enjoy it and she’s just doing her part to cheer me up. She and Balthazar are the two who just turn into lumps of fur when I pick them up.

Fur. Bal and Koosh are shedding. I just vacuumed and already the rug is covered in fur. Eric bathed both of them tonight just to get some of the loose fur off of them. They’re also getting gobs of Ferret Lax. I wonder who’ll be next.

TV

As some of you know, I’m way too involved with TV. I’d probably do much better if I junked the box and got on with life. But ... of course, I don’t. FX has been showing all the early Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes. We didn’t start watching until mid-way through the second season, so it’s nice to see some of the early ones. Sabrina the Teenage Witch has become a real favorite here. You have to pay attention; there are some really funny lines and esoteric references. Then there’s the new Star Trek show, Enterprise. I’m totally put-off by the music. I can’t see a folk-song type theme song on a sci fi show. What were they thinking?

I’ll have to write more tomorrow. It’s 1:15 am and I should get some sleep. The ferrets are all conked out. Me too.

We’re so caught up in things now -- bombing Afghanistan, anthrax scares -- that we forget that there are still men and women at ground zero pulling bodies out of the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Today there were more death notices for people who died on September 11. I’m not sure I know how to move forward. I wonder if anyone knows.

Ferrets

The other day I was thinking about what our ferrets would be like if they were really big -- the size of, say, German Shepherd dogs. It’d be weird. But it would be easier to let them sleep in the bed with us; I wouldn’t worry about squashing them when I roll over.

Balthazar has runny poop again. Every couple of months it happens. Nothing precipitates it; just one day Bal wakes up and has runny poop. We’ve had him tested for all sorts of things, but nothing pans out. I give him Kaopectate for a day or two and he’s OK again. So now we’re trying rotating out foods for a month or so. Maybe one of them is sometimes borderline bad and Bal’s sensitive to it.

Now I'm going back to watching TV. It's nearly midnight.

It's been a little while

I finally stopped watching the news all day. Now I watch it only at night -- though I do check CNN.com a few times a day. There are moments when it almost feels normal again ... but then it's gone.

Yesterday, Eric and I went to the Long Island Fair at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration. It was supposed to be a day to walk around and relax a bit. We walked around the village a little before we went to the fairgrounds. It was a warm, sunny day.

We stopped at the schoolhouse in time to hear one of the volunteers talk about what school was like 150 years ago. The fact that sticks with me is that male schoolteachers were paid $15.00 a month, female schoolteachers were paid $7.50 a month. No schoolteacher -- man or woman -- could be married. I guess it was just more expensive to be a man back then.

Next we walked through the general store, and then on to the fairgrounds. Everything was very sweet and old-fashioned, as it always is there. But then reality began to poke through. Small buckets of "patriotic" lapel pins -- US map or flag -- many US flags of various sizes, that look in people's eyes. I bought a little flag lapel pin for $2.25. I had wanted one but couldn't find one anywhere around town that wasn't too expensive or too cheap looking. The post left a hole in my blouse. Oh well.

We walked through the petting "zoo." Camels are very large (and weren't available for petting, presumably because they didn't want to be petted). The donkey was nice. The sheep were ... sheep. I was a little disturbed by the marsupial (I forget the name, but it was related to the wallaby); he/she looked uncomfortable, hiding out inside a large plastic dog carrier. The sign said that these marsupials live in big groups -- so why they kept this one by him/herself, I don't know, but it explains why the animal seemed unhappy to be there. The other animals were all farm-type animals that were happy enough to be standing around.

We finally walked into the big building where all the entries into the various competitions are displayed: flowers, fruit and vegetables, paintings, models, quilts, sweaters, afghans, place settings. Maybe I didn't want to notice it when we first walked in. I realized the first drawings and paintings we were looking at were by children, but I was trying to be in another world, so not much else registered. We looked at the dollhouses, the hand-made airplanes and cars. We looked at the drawings and paintings by adults; the huge flowers, the fruit, the vegetables. We looked at the afghans, the quilts, the sweaters, the clothing -- some had representations of flags or were red, white, and blue. Then we got to some more models.

Many of them were made with Legos or Kinex (is that how it's spelled?), so I knew right away they were by children. Then the elderly lady who was staffing the display started to talk to us. She said that these were all done by children between the ages of 7 and 13 years. She said that the paintings and drawings across the aisle (which Eric and I had looked at first, when we came into the building) were also by children aged 7 to 13 years. After she walked away to talk to some other people, I started to look more closely at the little models. Several had little American flags on them. Several were of two towers. Reality pushed all the way through. I walked up and down the aisle, looking at all the little models, all the towers and flags, all the red, white and blue, and I kept thinking, “children, 7 to 13 years.” I had to go back and look at the children’s drawings again. Flags, towers, cityscapes -- even one cityscape with towers and a gray cloud over the scene. With the quilts, the adult artwork, I expected some patriotic images. But I wasn’t prepared to see the children’s artwork. It made me sad. It made me remember how my world changed the moment my Mother died, when I was 10. I wouldn’t wish that on any child, and yet it has happened to every child.

We walked out into the sunshine. Then we walked to see the award-winning rabbits and goats, and then back onto the dirt roads. It was too peaceful. Too simple.

Driving home, I came down Ronkonkoma Avenue from the Long Island Expressway. Three fire trucks came from the opposite direction and I felt terrible because it must have been a big fire. Then as we went a little farther down the road, more flashing lights -- a stopped police car. I’m not sure exactly when I realized that it was a memorial service for one of the firefighters or police officers who had died in the terrorist attacks. There were several buses in the strip-mall parking lot across from the funeral home, and a mass of people in dark clothes crowded around the entrance to the funeral home. So many people. There was a police officer directing traffic, so all the people could get from the parking lot across the street over to the funeral home. I drove past very slowly.

When I got home, I looked in the newspaper. The memorial service was for Glenn Pettit, a police officer and a volunteer firefighter. He was 30 years old.