My Littlest Pet Shop......of Neglect

Goooood Morning you! I have some Shout Outs to start with today.

Special thanks to the following people who submitted ideas on how to build that magic rainbow cake I showed you a picture of a few weeks ago: Rude Barb, Steph A, Rachel B, and Molly M. I am grateful that you cared enough to toy with the notion that I was actually ambitious enough to build a cake that requires separating out dough into 27 different bowls. Thanks for believing in me.

And now some Worldwide Shouts: Apparently visits to this site have increased dramatically over the past few weeks. You crazy Canadians upped your readers from 14 to 50. UK, same thing there, 60 of you wanky bastards stopped by last week. And waaay down in Australia the one reader that I was pretty sure was just a narcolepsy-ridden koala bear that happened to fall out of his tree onto a laptop consistently every Friday, must actually be a person, with friends, because there were 16 of you here last week. And back in the USSA, there were like 500+. Now I know that these views could realistically be from only a handful of people, but either way, it made me pumped to see, so thank you very much. Continue to pimp out my site, and I'll continue to give you 80% of the non-existent profit I make from doing this every week.....as long as you promise to stop burning me with your cigarette lighter.

On to the show. Alright so throughout my life, I have always loved animals. Like every child in 1st grade, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but once I figured out that Intro to Logic wasn't going to cut it for my math requirements for vet school, the dream died, and I let that ship sail. But that never stopped me from being able to purchase animals. On the whole, I'm very good with large animals. Dogs, cats, pigs, horses, cows. I can handle those, their needs are more easily identifiable, and not meeting them can result in some obvious signs of distress. But small animals, ehhh not so much.

I have had a series of unfortunate small animal disasters in my time, spanning the decades. But I believe it all started in 3rd grade, when I was given a Beta fish as a gift. If you know anything about the world at all, you of course know that a Beta fish can literally live its entire life in a puddle, successfully. They are like the most resilient bastards in the entire fish world. I had a friend in college that stopped feeding his and stopped cleaning its tiny tank, and the thing lived for like 3 years eating its own shit. I mean, they are nuts. So you'd think even a small child would be able to care for one, given the proper tools.

This is what my Beta fish looked like after 3 hours in my house:

I don't really even need to tell you that he was dead before the next morning. But I will: he was dead before the next morning. I think it had something to do with the water temperature, or my childhood home being close to power lines, but either way, it was still the first sign that I should probably not be responsible for the lives of very small creatures.

Fast forward to college. I'm sharing an apartment with 2 other people, and after a impromptu visit to the Humane Society, I come home with 2 baby parakeets. Frank and Norman. Did I think about how my roommates might feel about this? Absolutely not. This is what baby parakeets look like:

Only after getting these little guys home did I think to go online and read about socializing parakeets. I honestly assumed that since they were babies, they would trust me and love me and sit on my shoulders and sing along with the radio and it would be so cool to have them around as pets. The first sentence of the first article I found on google stated the following about raising parakeets: "To correctly socialize a baby parakeet, owners must spend an average of 8-12 hours a day handling and training their new friends to ensure complete bonding can occur and formation of trust develops." 8-12 hours.What the fuck. 8-12 days later, and I've resorted to setting their cage outside on the front step with their door open in an attempt to get them to fucking fly away into the sunset or with the hope that some drunk college student will steal them. No such luck on either counts. So I was forced to return them to the Humane Society, who at this point should have probably put up a flier with my picture on it letting their employees know not to sell me anything with a heart smaller than a golf ball.

Fast forward again, 2 years later, I graduated from college and moved back home since the 1986 Chevy Nova I had been driving for the past 5 years finally died and I needed to save up to buy a new car. Again, I take an impromptu trip to the Human Society. And again I come home with 2 new little friends. This round, 2 baby mice. Stumpy and Squinty. Stumpy for the missing tail that his birth mother had eaten off at the time of his delivery, and Squinty for the fact that he seemed to be missing an eye. What can I say, I have a weak spot for creatures that justify the existence of natural selection.

My mother was horrified that I had 1) paid for mice and 2) brought them into her home. I told her it would be fine, I knew what I was doing, and that they would stay in my room. As the days went by, I noticed that Stumpy and Squinty didn't seem to be getting along very well. Squinty had taken to attacking Stumpy in the middle of the night so I would awake to the sound of tiny mouse screams. After again doing research after the fact, I learned that you are never supposed to have 2 male mice in the same cage, so the brain dead HS employee who insisted that they would be just find together is really responsible for what happened next.

I let them go in the woods.

At different tree stumps mind you, with little piles of food. I said good bye, and apologized for being such a shitty caretaker. I especially felt bad for Stumpy, who was probably not going to survive the week since he had been sustaining nightly curbstompings from Squinty for the last month. I would be lying if I told you I didn't cry a little. I think it was a combination of genuinely feeling bad that my actions and carelessness could cause the death of something so tiny, and the realization of the fact that I really am terrible at caring for animals smaller than a basketball.

Since this last episode, I have successfully raised a 90 lb Chesapeake Bay Retriever puppy from 6 weeks to his current 3 years. And aside from his ridiculously good looks and occasional rough housing, he is a good dog. And seems pretty happy to be living in the Q household.

Last night my husband told me his boss just bought seahorses and that the male is pregnant. I wish you could have seen the way my eyes lit up like a Christmas tree upon hearing that.
OHMYGODYOUCANHAVESEAHORSESASPETS.

I'm not going to let my jaded history hold me back on this one. Mark my words: I'm getting seahorses. And I'm going to learn what do to so that they don't die within 48 hours of purchasing them. And they are going to be fucking kick ass and they are going to have little tiny sea horse parties and balls and will go floating about drinking tiny martinis and wearing tiny necklaces made of seashells.

Have a super weekend.

~Maria