Continue reading »]]> This story begins at Publix.

Danielle and I went out shopping last weekend to pick up some necessities.  It was raining, so neither of us had much desire to be out, but out we went.

By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, but the ground was still wet.  We walked to the car, put all of the groceries in the back seat (we had left our recycling bins in the trunk on accident), and I put away the grocery cart.  On my way back to the car, I noticed a furry white thing run under the car.

That looked like…, I thought.  But how… it must have been a cat.  But still, it reminded me of a rat, and rats are cute.  According to Danielle, all I said was “Aww…”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I think a rat just crawled under the car,” I said, realising that the furry white thing was much too small to be a cat.  She looked, and sure enough it was a rat.

–

“What do we do about it?” she asked, hesitantly.

“Catch it, of course.”  Some part of me knew that what I was doing was crazy, but a larger part of me didn’t care.  I love rats.  Rats are pretty much my favourite animal ever.  Regardless of the outcome, if I didn’t try to save this animal from the cats and soccer moms that would surely kill it on sight, I couldn’t live with myself.

Danielle took a little convincing, but when I explained to her that Fancy Rats don’t exist in the wild, she decided to let me try my crackpot plan.  We took a recycling bin out of the trunk, put some of the cereal we had just bought inside of it, and tried to coax the rat into it.  She was much to clever for that (the nickname we gave her at first was “Prudence”).  After about 15 minutes of her avoiding the bin by walking sideways like a crab, I put the bin down.  Enough of that nonsense.

By this time, a few Publix employees had noticed our erratic movements around the parking lot (I can only imagine what we looked like to people that didn’t see the rat).  When one of them walked up to see what was going on, the rat simply ran up to him and crawled around on his shoes for a few minutes.

When he went back into the store, I decided to test my luck.  Against my better judgement (and Danielle’s warnings), I decided to simply kneel down and hold out my hand.  The rat walked right up to me.  I tried to pick her up.  She let me.  Deciding not to tempt fate, I quickly placed her into the recycling bin.  She didn’t seem to mind.  Danielle later wondered if the rat just wanted to be caught.

–

Danielle and I took her home, the insanity of what we were doing sinking in along the way.  Now what?  I pulled the rats’ travel cage (a bird cage that I found in the garbage a few years ago) out of the closet and filled it with bedding, a box, food, and water.  We placed the rat in.  She didn’t bite me this time either.  I must be the rat whisperer.

I gave her a quick examination, and to my amazement, she seemed perfectly healthy, except for the sneezing, which I would guess was partially caused by being out in the rain.  I took her to the vet the next day, just to be sure, and he confirmed my thoughts… she just had a mild case of myco.  And he was “fairly sure” that she was a female. When I mentioned that most male rats I’ve encountered were quite obviously male, he merely commented, “Yeah, usually…”  Deciding not to pursue that line of discussion any further, I simply raised my eyebrows and chuckled.

He gave me some medicine to give her, and we were on our way.

–

Since we already have rats, and this one had become our newest addition, Danielle suggested the name Zoey, a tribute to Zooey Deschanel, lead actress on the show New Girl.  Since I thought the name was clever, and I’m a huge fan of Zooey Deschanel anyway, I endorsed it.  Our other room-mate was fine with it, so it was decided.

Zoey, the rat who lived. What are the odds?

Continue reading »]]> Well, for the nth time I’m re-launching my presence in the virtual world.  Part of me wonders how long I’ll keep this up before I decide to start from scratch again, but part of me doesn’t much care anymore.

When I look back at all of the presences I’ve had on the web over my lifetime, they all match who I was at the time.  My first blog was an experiment, learning how to share with the world.  My next blog was more focused, but when I lost interest in the subject area, it too faded.  Since then, I’ve re-invented my online self periodically to match the person I had become.

Now that I have a college degree and a stable job, and I am looking at the prospect of marrying the love of my life, there’s some sense of stability creeping in that my adolescent and undergraduate self never had.  So perhaps this site will stick around for a while.  Or perhaps stability doesn’t mean that things stop changing.  Only time will tell.

But for now, I am once again the Binary Packrat, and I welcome you to my new home.