A couple weeks ago in the pet store I saw something we never see there: a mouse among the pocket pets. They often have rats, and gerbils, and hamsters, and some of the bigger rodents like chinchillas and guinea pigs. But a plain old mouse? Never, which is what made the cage labelled as having (I thought) a male white mouse of estimated one year age remarkable. The mouse was under observation, not yet ready to go home yet. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was intrigued; we've been thinking about getting a new mouse ever since Fezziwig died, and the only drawback would be that a one-year-old mouse is already halfway through his life. Still, a year is better than none.
Yesterday bunnyhugger finally had a bit of time to go and examine the mouse, see what she thought of them, see if they're ready to go home with anyone. And maybe a quarter-hour later she called home asking if we still had that bag of rat-and-mouse food from a while back. So that spoiled the big surprise.
The little surprise is that this was not a year-old boy mouse. This is a year-old girl mouse and the pet store has no idea where I would have been a boy mouse among their adoptable animals. Someone made a mistake and I bet it was me, to start.
bunnyhugger had somehow gone out not anticipating adopting the mouse and so had to put together the aged old frame of the mouse cage that had warped gently through years in the attic and basement and all. In the meanwhile the mouse somewhat patiently stayed taped up in the cardboard box used to transport her home, scritching and chewing some. When her house was finally ready bunnyhugger picked her up and was distressed that the mouse squeaked, a sound that represents a mouse's desperate cry to please don't hurt me. Well, of course, wouldn't dream of hurting her, and by today afternoon she had settled enough to have built a nest and to be sleeping through my shoving a camera her cage. For example, please consider:
Here she is in the first nest she's built. We know that won't last; we're hoping to make a larger cage for her out of a storage bin, but for now this is a pretty good space and she's comfortable taking daytime naps.
She's smaller than Fezziwig was and given her size and colors it's natural to wonder if she might have been a feeder mouse who got lucky.
She spent all last night getting the contours of her cage understood. This morning as I was leaving for work she was climbing back and forth on the bars. By the time I got home, she was sleeping.
She was more interested in her nap time than in posing, which, fair enough, although she did give me one good lengthy stretch for the camera.
Enough stretch! Back to grooming.
Meanwhile our rabbit does not see why make so much fuss about an animal that could fit in her ear if she wanted. We'll talk about it.
Trivia: The docking ring on Apollo 14's lunar module, as a pure mechanical device, had no instrumentation to check when it would not latch during transposition and docking. Source: Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965 - 1992, Rich Houston, Milt Heflin.
Currently Reading: Infinite Cosmos: Visions from the James Webb Space Telescope, Ethan Siegel.
