Funny Ratties

Here's what happens when I try to take a picture of the ratties:

See? They love having their pictures taken so much that they just have to hop on my lap and try to help with it! This actually happens a whole lot, get too happy taking pictures and they run up and try to inspect the lens close up. Also, you may notice the rat-tail phenomenon in this picture: even your best pictures tend to end up with a random rat's tail in them. If you're trying to get a picture of just a single rat, it's usually just the tail that you got, so you know a good picture when you get something besides just that.

Here's what happens when you try to read a book in bed while the ratties are playing:

Actually, it's surprising they are so stationary in this picture. It's actually because they were each given a treat. It's amazing what that will do to a rat's mobility, they just stop and eat!

Speaking of mobility, here's Scotty, who loves to chew holes in towels. This time, he's discovered a possible issue with chewing a hole in the towel:

Uhoh! He got horribly stuck. I actually tried to help extricate him from it, but he wasn't very happy with me helping so I let him work out the problem. He eventually made it out, luckily:

Finally, there's a pose that the rats all use, but it's really tough to get a picture of. I finally got one tonight though, this only happens when they're resting, they just lie down and flatten out, it's terribly cute. Usually when you try to get a picture of it they perk up and come see what you were doing, but this time I happened to be right next to the camera and didn't alert Blue before taking the picture. I only got one try though, it's lucky it did turn out:

Bread: Entertainment Value High

The ratties got an afternoon snack today. I ended up with a single extra slice of bread after making sandwiches, and since it was the end of the loaf I figured the rats would probably enjoy it much more than I would. It turns out that I probably enjoyed it nearly as much!

The rats were all sleeping, it being around 2pm or so. I ripped up the bread into four pieces, all quite big, and then took a bit off one of those to offer to Barrick, who seemed the most awake. Then put the other pieces in the cage. Barrick immediately was interested and happily munched away. Scotty and Lu Bu woke up from where they were sleeping on the main level (inside the yellow thing (tm)) and grabbed large pieces. Blue emerged from the hideout on the top floor and took another one of the large pieces (a single one now remaining) and all of them scattered. Blue back up to the hideout, and the others to whatever corner they could find. Blue managed to alert Cao Cao to the presence of food, as Cao Cao was sleeping in the hideout, but after unsuccessfully trying to steal Blue's piece, he ended up going down and finding the largest slice of bread and taking that. No, I don't know why the others didn't take the largest piece. I guess they just were so happy to see it at all that they didn't care.

Anyways, this was all very interesting, but not especially entertaining until Scotty decided that instead of eating, it was time to stash his piece of bread. So he trundles down to the bottom of the cage and puts the piece of bread into the tissue box there. Looks around a few times, then goes back up to the main floor and... takes Lu Bu's bread! And he runs off down the ramp and stashes that in the box too. Naturally Lu Bu decides that he needs more bread, and starts trying to take Blue and Cao Cao's pieces but failing. Scotty comes back up the ramp and immediately manages a perfect steal on Cao Cao's piece! Back down the ramp he goes and stashes that into the box. Barrick has now finished his small piece and so he, Cao Cao and Lu Bu are running around frantically trying to find their missing bread! Blue has fortified the hideout and is generally sneaky so they don't notice he's still got a rather large piece. I was cheering for Scotty to steal the last piece as well, but he couldn't make it past Blue's defenses and instead the rest of the rat squad ransacked the tissue box and removed all the carefully stashed pieces of bread. Alas, a hiding place is never safe from hungry ratties!

Rat Antics

The rats have had a slightly longer time out of the cage today than usual, and so there are several moments which I will collect here that stick out.

Unusually, we let the rats play some during the afternoon. They are very sleepy during the afternoon and usually snooze the whole time, so when the cage got opened they approached it with some trepidity, or perhaps laziness. L managed to coax most of them out to go exploring, but even with some vigorous coaxing Lu Bu decided to remain sleeping in the cage. He eventually came out later, but it was clear that we were not going to interrupt his nap and he would emerge on his own terms.

2
(I don't know how Cao Cao managed to type 2 and enter on the numeric keypad as he walked across it, but since that appears to fit, I'm going to leave it.)

Also during the afternoon, Scotty demonstrated an amazing leap, as he jumped from the floor to the top of a bag of bedding, which is a good 2 feet or so off the floor. It really surprised L, who was watching them nearby.

After returning to their cage as we were about to head off to the baseball game, Patty came by to say hi to the ratties. They did their usual thing, and stacked up in the corner, three noses high. If you have ever seen the rats pile up, it was an especially cute pile in the corner presenting all three's noses towards Patty, even lining them up nicely.

Later in the evening after we got back, there were several other incidents. Cao Cao decided that my baseball cap sitting on the desk was a very good thing to hide inside. He sort of shuffled around with it, and I tried to catch a picture of him poking his head out of the back (where he'd entered). He seemed to like it, but while moving around he also seemed to want to knock the hat off the desk with him inside it. This was narrowly averted, but it looked like he was eager to try it again, so I moved the hat.

Scotty got to play shoulder rat and see what L was doing in the living room. Scotty was pretty good about this, but eventually got bored while watching L play guitar hero 2, and he was dropped off in the room and given a treat. At which point Lu Bu hopped on my foot, and looked up at me - "My Turn! I want treats too! Take me on a shoulder trip!". So he got to visit the living room as well. He is much more well-behaved, and didn't try to hop off the shoulder until after the song finished.

Lu Bu also starred in the twitching rat encounter today. He loves to sit on the desk in between my monitors, next to a speaker and the speaker control box thingie. This is coincidentally the one clear spot on the desk which has the air conditioner blowing directly on it. We refer to him sitting there like so: "Lu Bu's chilling again." The funny thing about this is that he seems to have a really weird nervous reaction while sitting there. Barrick came up to him and preened some of the hair on his back, but when he did this, Lu Bu's tail would twitch madly! I'd seen this happen before, but it's always really crazy. If he gets preened while sitting in front of the AC, his tail twitches like mad. Doesn't happen anywhere else. If I pet him behind the neck while he's sitting there, it'll sometimes happen as well. Really weird.

Speaking of Lu Bu, he tried to escape with the Mac OSX cd case today, lugging it halfway along the shelf and into a cubby hole. Not sure if he had a computer in the cubby hole he wanted to install it on, he got bored after reaching that destination and went off elsewhere.

Barrick decided to balance and pose for me today. Seated on top of a huge plastic container on the top shelf, just under the Much Ado poster. I haven't checked to see if those pictures have turned out yet.

Finally, Blue has been very quiet today, and so I don't really have any stories about him. He did try to steal a leftover peanut from Lu Bu, but didn't appear to be successful at it. I just went over to ask him if he had done anything interesting today - "No comment." I suspect I should go see what trouble he's been into quietly. He did organize a ratty gang, after I found him to see what he'd been up to, he hopped onto my shoulder, along with Lu Bu, Cao Cao and Barrick, and they ran around a bit then hopped back off.

Rat Guide

This is a quick guide to our new rats, with a photo of each, plus special bonus pictures at the end!

This is Barrick:
He has found a quiet place to hide where none of the other ratties would dare bother him. Unfortunately, it is in the clothes hamper, and thus the humans have found him and are hoping he did not chew on any towels.

Next we have Blue:
He is checking our router settings and all the cables, making sure none of them are chewed on or otherwise rendered unusable.

Next we have Cao Cao:
Cao Cao is being a good photo-rat and is posing on my shoulder as I take his picture in the mirror. This photo shoot turned out so well that it inspired one of the later pictures.

Here we have Lu Bu:
He is clearly exhausted from keeping the other rats in line, and thus is laying down for a nap. Conveniently, this is right next to the door, so if someone should come in or out he will have a perfect chance to scoot out the door after them.

Finally, Scotty:
"It's a mirror! If I jump high enough I can see myself!" For some reason the rats really liked the mirror, I sat down near it and that caused them to investigate. While doing so, several of them tried jumping up into the mirror, as I'm guessing it looked like a ledge they could hang on to. I have no idea how I got lucky enough to take this picture.

Finally, we have some bonus pictures. These were inspired by my earlier attempts to photograph ratties in the mirror. First we have Cao Cao, who was actually quite calm and interested in that rat he saw in the mirror.

Lu Bu decided to investigate the mirror as well, but he didn't get a lift, so his view was a lot worse. Great shot of all his whiskers, though!
And finally we have a group photo, all the ratties clustered around my toes while I was working on taking pictures in the mirror. This one turned out really well, I'm not sure how I got the lighting to work, as the tones are very nice and non-flashy, but the rats are very in focus which isn't very common when not using the flash.

And that's it. I did some cropping on most of these photos, and on the first five there's obviously some changing of brightness, I was experimenting to see if it would draw attention better to the rats, while still giving an idea of their surroundings. I'm happy with some of those ones, but I'm not as sure about others, I think the effect is better used on only a few (Cao Cao, Barrick, Blue's turned out well. Not as sure about Lu Bu or Scotty's). The last ones were only cropped, they turned out good.

Brooding Prince

That would be Barrick, one of our rats. It could possibly refer to my mood today, which was terribly bad. Not far any good reason, just felt like I got nowhere except in planning stuff out at work, kept getting interrupted in whatever I was doing and nothing I did want to do turned out well. Except the Braves game, which we won vs the Mets, that'd be the good bit. Though I had to miss about half of it for group meeting.

Anyways, going to briefly talk about Barrick and his personality. He's very distinctively marked - mostly white, with a black ring around the neck, and some mottled black splotches elsewhere. This type is usually called possum marked, or possum hooded. He's right in the middle as far as weight goes, being around 310g.

Barrick doesn't like being around people. Or rats. Or anything, really. He's the most antisocial of the bunch and will dart away from hands that might want to pet him. When placed on a shoulder, he'll leap down. Doesn't care about safety, just wants to get away. This hasn't really changed much even though we try to pet him a lot and get him more well adjusted. He will hang out with the other rats and usually is one of the ones sleeping in a pile, but occasionally when they are all awake he'll be the one off in a completely different part of the cage pretending to nap. He does tussle with the others a decent bit, and I've been trying to figure out if he's ending up as the dominant rat. Probably not so far, but it's possible.

A good example of Barrick's shyness is the story from the previous post. Yep, he's the one who didn't even escape the cage after a door had been left open. He was probably happy to be left alone by the rest. Barrick does have a favorite thing to do though: burrow in the blankets/sheets. He will spend long stretches of time sneaking around under the blankets, only to poke his nose out in a completely unexpected spot to see whether anything interesting is going on outside. Not that he tends to go out, but he will get interested sometimes, at least as long as we're very careful to not startle him back into the covers. He is a very picky eater, and does not like taking medicine unless it's really diluted with some food he likes (usually sweet potato baby food). Lastly, Barrick was named for a moody prince in the Tad Williams series Shadowmarch (i'd just read the second book in the series, Shadowplay), mainly because he shares many of the same traits with that prince.