Having a pet gray squirrel

I have been rehabilitating squirrels for eleven years. That sounds like I provide a safe judgement free zone for squirrels recovering from addiction, but I actually just raise baby squirrels until they're strong enough to go outdoors and squirrel it up. I enjoy it, but it can be hard to let them go. You get pretty attached to the little beasts. It's not illegal to keep a gray squirrel as a pet in Florida, and so over the years we have acquired a few unreleasable squirrels. Here's a few things I've learned about keeping squirrels over the years.

1. They get into everything.
Squirrels explore like Lewis and Clark after a morning espresso. Everywhere is fair game, and if you look away for more than a few seconds they might disappear. We've lost squirrels under beds, behind bookshelves, and under desks. Every squirrel I've ever had has tried to get onto our ceiling fans. Potted plants are an absolute favorite. One squirrel named Pippin was fond of a large corn plant we kept in the house, he'd climb onto it and scream if I tried to take him off. He bit me rather badly over that corn plant once. Another squirrel, Benedict, was enamored by our Christmas tree, but I never let him get close enough to it to repeat what Pippin had done. Really, if you have anything in your house you don't want a squirrel getting into, you need to watch them like a hawk.

                            When I say they get into everything, that includes your nostrils

2. They are incredibly social.
Squirrels like to be with other squirrels, and if they are by themselves than they want to be with you. They really only have two modes, trying to play with you, and asleep. Once you get them out they want to play, snuggle, bite, climb, and explore, and they want you to be with them. It's exhausting. If you are very lucky and your squirrel is tired you might be able to nestle them in your shirt and pet them into unconsciousness. It is very easy to do this when they are babies, harder when they grow up and their endurance level quadruples.

                                              Thor, wrestling with my Mom's arm.

 Quick tip: squirrels universally love having the side of their neck rubbed, right under their chin. Their head stretches out to the side and they just relax, it's adorable. Here's Thor getting his neck scratched.

3. Wear long sleeves. Squirrels will climb you like they climb a tree, by digging their claws in and hoisting themselves up by the footholds they have created in your flesh. It's painful, and it leaves little scratches all over your skin, unless you wear long sleeves. My mom is a type one diabetic, so injuries take longer to heal for her. Her arms still have faint white crisscrosses all down them from when we didn't bother to wear long sleeves.

4. They like to chew.
It's common for rodents to chew, rats and rabbits are both famous for it, but squirrels are obsessive. I buy them ferret hammocks, they chew through the hanging cords, I keep the babies in plastic sweater boxes when they're little, I can tell they're ready to go into a wire cage when they chew through them. Plastic platforms on their cages grow smaller by the day, and they reduce whole newspapers to confetti. If they find anything interesting their first instinct will be to try and chew it, so keep them away from electronics. I have a laptop with teethmarks on it because I was too slow. Also keep their cages at least a half foot away from furniture.

                                        Our squirrel Sophie happily munches on a stolen saltine

5. They smell like pepper.
Well they do! Every squirrel I've ever picked up and smooched had delightfully spicy smelling fur. Not sure why, but it's quite pleasant.



6. I'm actually repeating something I read before, but it's true. The softest thing in the world is a squirrel belly. They feel like angel wings.



7. They play games.
Squirrels love to wrestle your arms and play bite your fingers. When they are in their cages squirrels are very fond of backflips, and occasionally they make up other games. I had one squirrel that liked to race around the cage, and touch the third corner of the cage every time around.

8. They have crocodilian jaw strength.
I have been bitten a lot. It's not fun, It's pretty obvious that they would have strong jaws for breaking through nuts, but it's still impressive to be on the receiving end of a chomp. I've had squirrels crack all the way through my fingernail without any effort. Scary, and not cool.

Squirrels are adorable little beasts, and when I was little I always wanted to be able to pet one. Now that I have three of them as pets I love them just as much, and I CAN pet them, which is awesome. They are a big responsibility though, they require a large cage, at least a ferret cage, and a lot of attention. They're sassy little things, and no matter how tame they are they may still bite you if you make them mad. Once you've raised a squirrel to adulthood and treated him as a pet it would be VERY hard to reintroduce him to the wild. Just like a domestic dog, he wouldn't know how to live on his own safely. Squirrels can live up to twenty years, so if you have any doubts about whether you'd be able to, or WANT to keep an energetic rodent that long, don't try and keep one as a pet.

Making Galaxy Shoes.

So I like making things. Jewelry, costume parts, scarves and ornaments, all kinds of things. My newest project is a pair of galaxy shoes. The picture below is an example of a beautiful pair from an Etsy shop.


Photo courtesy of  Kristen S. https://www.etsy.com/shop/KristenMakesArt?ref=l2-shopheader-name

There are a lot of tutorials on the web, and I decided I wanted to make a pair. I followed a wonderful youtube video that you should probably just watch instead of reading this post, but you're a nice person and you'll finish reading instead right?

 First I got a cheap white pair of canvas tennis shoes  from Amazon. Looking back they worked well but it was kind of stupid to get white ones. I wanted to start my galaxy shoes with a black background because, well, space, so next time I'll skip the extra step and buy black tennis shoes.

Next I bought fabric paint, brand name Scribbles from Hobby Lobby.

You can buy these from Amazon but they are five dollars a bottle, at Hobby Lobby they are $1.29 a bottle, so I recommend trying to find them in a craft store. My only problem with them is that the dried paint is very grainy and stiff. I probably wouldn't use them on shirts or clothes I like to be bendy. The end result stays very well. I've colored two pairs of shoes with them, and worn a pair for several months at work and the color hasn't chipped or faded. Good stuff.
Besides shoes and fabric paint, the other items you need are as follows:
A sponge brush
Masking tape
A toothbrush
Newspaper
Nasty cup for rinsing out your sponges
a paperclip, pencil, or other small pointy object

Okay, time to actually get started. Lay out some newspaper to prevent painting goo from going everywhere, and then put masking tape securely around the sole of the shoe. The photo below is not mine because I did not have the foresight to take a good picture of the shoes taped.


Photo courtesy of http://www.sparklecollective.com/galaxy-painted-converse/

Next cover that entire freaking shoe with black fabric paint. I squeezed the paint onto a paper plate and then scooped it up on a sponge brush, but by the end I was just applying the paint directly to the sponge. You're going to apply a lot of pressure to some parts of the shoe to get all of it black, and remember to apply paint to the creases around the tape. Also don't forget the tongue of the shoe. Chances are you'll get black paint on the inside of the shoe, but don't sweat it, your foot will cover that up. I left my shoes for about a day after painting them black, but I would imagine they'd be ready in about 1 to 2 hours. The paint dries quick.

Once dried, select the color you'd like to start with. I started with purple. I wanted to use every single color I had. I wanted the toes of the shoes to be especially vibrant, so I painted roughly half the toe in purple, spreading the color around so that it wasn't too thick and brushing around the edges until they were soft, not hard lines. I found working in a kind of circular motion worked best, but anything that colored the shoe was successful in my book.
After purple I painted the rest of the toe in green. While painting leave the edges kind of ragged and cloudy, and when painting in a new color overlap the edges so that the two colors go smoothly into one another. I found leaving the new paint for about ten minutes made them dry enough to paint with a new color.
Something else you want to keep in mind is which colors go together, and which are complementary, that is, which colors mix to become brown or gray. I didn't know which colors were complementary until I took an art class, so here is a helpful color wheel if you are also unfamiliar.


Photo courtesy of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/color-theory-101-making-complementary-colors-work-for-you-179143

If you look at any color on this wheel, and mix it with the color directly opposite to it, you will get a brown or gray color. Red is complementary to green, blue is complementary to orange, and so on. So with my purple paint, I could easily use a blue, red, or green color next, but I didn't want to use yellow.
My end result starting from the original purple and going around the shoe was purple, red, yellow, green, purple. I colored the toe in blue as well. This particular blue, called a "crystal gel" didn't add a blue color so much as a sheen and a lot of blue sparkles, which I thought were suitably spacelike.
Once that was done I had the baseline, and then I applied some white very lightly in an oval pattern on the toe of the shoe and near the heel to make a galaxy. Make sure to rough the edges of the white out.
Then came the toothbrush. The youtube video I linked to above shows the toothbrush spewing white paint in beautiful flecks across the shoe. I don't know how she did that, I imagine she must have used different paint, or I'm just incompetent, but I couldn't make mine do that. I recommend using the toothbrush anyway though, because once you apply the white paint to the toothbrush and scrape your thumb violently across the bristles, you'll find it does spray some tiny flecks. Not a lot, but enough to make shoe look a little more randomized, like space.
For the big flecks I dipped an unfolded paperclip in white paint and stabbed my shoe at random all over. Remember to add some dots in clusters in some areas, especially the areas of white that are supposed to be galaxies. Here is the finished product.

I find them quite beautiful, and if I make more I might try making the base color red or blue instead of black. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone, and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

On the Character of Reptiles

    Hello ladies and gentlemen. Or, based on the traffic source stats, hello adult web sites. I hope my blog entertains you.

    According to the press there has been a discovery that crocodilians like alligators use sticks as bait to attract nest building birds to eat. I'm not completely convinced that all these sticks aren't just suctioning themselves to the alligators by accident, but I won't ever argue that reptiles don't think. I want to believe that all animals think and are individuals, but I will admit that there isn't a lot of evidence for reptile personality. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist though, let's look at some examples.
    First off, the most famous of these examples is probably the story of the zoo snake that befriended his hamster meal. Aochan the rat snake was given a live hamster named Gohan to eat after the snake refused to eat dead mice for two weeks. The snake did not eat Gohan, the hamster took a nap on the snake's coils, zoo keepers finally convinced him to eat dead mice, and apparently the snake and hamster have been cohabiting ever since. There is a video showing the snake and hamster living together. The hamster's movements certainly attract the snake's attention, but the snake simply turns away instead of striking and shows none of the expected annoyance when the very obese hamster climbs on top of him. This story began circulating in 2005, and there has been no information available on it since. It is possible that the snake finally snapped and ate the hamster, but I don't think so, such a sad end to a heartwarming story would have been publicized immediately. I might argue that this proves nothing because hamsters are not standard fare for rat snakes, but I honestly don't think that a hungry snake would turn down a furry warm rodent for any natural reason, even an unfamiliar beast such as a hamster. Ball pythons don't have a normal diet of squirrels, but my python Geralt displays great interest in eating Tony, the mentally ill squirrel next to him. I don't know how convinced I am about the snake and hamster being friends, but I can't think of a natural reason for the snake to keep little Gohan alive.
    Now I want to direct you to the tragic but beautiful story of Grace Olive Wiley. She was what would be called a reptile whisperer today. She kept and handled enormous alligators, rattlesnakes, cobras, mambas, and every other venomous and dangerous reptiles you can think of. She believed that every animal responded to kindness, and she would handle all her reptiles gently and without safety equipment. Fellow herpetologists were astonished at the way rattlesnakes responded to her, they were calm and never wanted to bite. There are pictures of her lazing about draped with one of her King cobras, and wearing rattlesnakes around her neck like ball pythons. She died at the age of 64 from a snake bite. The interesting thing however, was that the snake, who bit Wiley while she was trying to make it do a threat display, was a newly imported snake that had never met Wiley before. She was unable to use one of her own snakes, because they were too tame to do a threat display. She died from a snake bite, this means she wasn't special because something about her made her unthreatening, I think she was special because reptiles liked her. After she worked with them they didn't want to bite her and they were more gentle than they were before, that doesn't come across as an instinctual response.
    Finally I have my own experiences. Ginji the box turtle has already been described by me in an earlier blog post, but she is a wonderful example of a unique and unabashed personality. I kept a Bearded Dragon named Bertie for years, and he was one of the sweetest fellows I've ever met. He lived up to the reputation of Bearded Dragons as gentle giants, I think he liked to snuggle with me.
I will leave you with a terrible picture of my python Geralt. He has never had a heat lamp before, and when we recently moved Neo the turtle into my room, Neo's heat lamp caught his attention.

    This is a very small piece of evidence I know, but it's quite sweet to me. He stretched from all the way on the other side of the cage when he saw the light and he spent several minutes just staring up at it. He couldn't feel the heat, he has light from the room in his cage, but he came all the way over just to look up and see what was causing all that glow. I'm getting him a lamp as a present after Christmas.

The Dusty Corridors of Home

            Everyone has been rearranging furniture and dust these past two days. My father decided a few months ago that he wanted a standing desk.
 I always imagined a standing desk would look something like this,
and therefore it would be expensive and we would never actually get one.
      One day however, I came home and my dad's new standing desk was lying on my parents bed. This little desk actually resembled a black and depressing children's play table. It was meant to balance on top of a normal desk, moving your workstation to a place so high you could only work while balanced on your tiptoes.
     Having ascertained that the standing desk would balance ONLY on the clunky wooden desk in the kitchen, my father decided we would have to swap the desks in the kitchen and the bedroom. Simple enough for an ordinary house.
     Unfortunately my family lives in a 'starter home' (slang for eenie weeny house), and both my parents have the souls of old English scholars and the books to prove it.
     First we had to unpack the desks, (some of the shelves went on the squirrel cage and others with the dinner pans), and then we had to unpack and move a kitchen bookshelf. Next went the four hall bookshelves, which I helped move even though I could not actually pick up any of them. My father did not know how useless I was being, and so he moved them all essentially, himself. As of yet he still does not require medical attention.
     By this time we had moved half the items in the house to the floor, and both ways into the house were blocked off. My mother began to feel strange and I had a moment of panic trying to imagine how the EMTs were going to make it inside, before she informed me it was just her diabetes being difficult.
     The dogs decided around then that they needed to go outside, and when I simply shrugged and said 'too bad' they took it upon themselves to eat everything resting on the ground.
     We ate lunch balanced on our knees, my father standing up because there were only two chairs available and he had to get used to a standing desk anyway. After lunch Dad growled out something about the state of the dishes and I made a sound like a goblin to avoid an argument (I am the resident dish cleaner). It worked well.
     Dad and I managed to drag the desks into place while the dogs weaved back in forth under the heavy things we carried, and then we moved all the shelves back. Replacing the books was a raucous affair, my mother wanted to get rid of a few books, my father wanted to get rid of the whole bookshelf, and I kept finding stacks of books secreted around the house that made them argue over which books were worth keeping and whether Dad was hard to get along with.
     Now the room rearrangements are somewhat pleasing to the eye, though I am slightly concerned that my mother's desk will collapse under the weight of some of her things.
      I am looking forward to moving the turtle cage into my room tomorrow. This is a much better idea than my father's desk moving plan, because it requires the moving of no bookshelves at all.
     I do think that all this moving stuff has given me plenty of exercise, so that's good. I've now exercised three days out of four? Where are my ripped abs? Oh I know, hiding under the fat. Sigh.
 

Bad Dreams

I read something once about how there is nothing more boring then hearing about someone else's dream. I love telling people about my dreams, so that came as a nasty shock, and I hope it isn't the case with me. I feel I am quite blessed with my dreams, they make no sense, like all dreams, but they are hilarious. I am fortunate in my family as well, they never have any objections to hearing about my dreams, my father often tells me I should write them down.
Now, here's something I find interesting about the topic of dreams. It is really common in fiction for someone to have bad dreams, full on recurring nightmares that make the prospect of sleep terrifying. These dreams are often about something legitimately bad, or scary to the person having them: watching a loved one die, being chased by monsters, something creepy and disfiguring happening, whatever. The point is that this literally scary thing haunts this person in dreams, and they don't want to sleep because they don't want to live this nightmare over and over at night. Well, I used to wonder if dreams were really like that, and when I saw something scary on TV I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to forget it and that I would dream about it that night. If that happened then it was all over, just a couple of steps until I refused to sleep and spent my last days in a mental institution refusing all food but peanut butter covered celery. That was the logical progression in my mind at least. Now, I am scared by a lot, and two things that I'm absolutely terrified of are tornadoes and zombies. Zombies are a little illogical (right now at least! Always be prepared), but any time I try to actually imagine myself inside a zombie movie being chased by decomposing corpses I start hyperventilating. I mean ugh. And tornadoes are just wicked horrid forces of nature that kill people and make lots of noise.
I am scared of both of these things, and I dream about both of them a LOT. Like, several times a week. There are zombies creeping around outside our house or in old hospitals my family is inexplicably inside of. The zombies always end up finding us, and we have to run, and we do run, or drive, or fight, but it is SO scary, because my mind knows it's one of my worst fears and it makes me feel every second of it.
And somehow, in the midst of this zombie pockmarked wasteland in my head, a storm will stir up and tornadoes will come down. Multiple tornadoes, while we're in the car, and they come straight towards us, and they're making that train sound that they're famous for, and I'm curled up in a tight little ball in the car watching the horrid funnel thing come after us as we try to find a sturdy spot free of zombies. This is all horrid.
But you know what? It's awfully fun to remember when I wake up. It's fun to tell people, and it doesn't bother me when I wake up. The idea of dreaming about tornado zombie worlds doesn't make me afraid to fall asleep. I'm pretty okay with it.
The dreams that do bother me are hard to explain. It's not the contents, it's the feelings they invoke. They make me feel sad, or helpless, or ugly in some way. When I wake up, I feel BAD, and I can't stop thinking about them unless I pray to God that they stop bothering me. I remember one dream, kind of disgusting, but mainly weird. There was something killing deer in my dream, always in the woods. I would look at the bodies and try to find out what had attacked them. To go to the woods I had to cross a bridge covered in fire ants, and they would attack me. The actual woods weren't woods at all, everything was beige and orange, and soft, like we were in something's insides. The surroundings reminded me powerfully of vomit. When I woke up I felt horrible, and seriously disturbed. Now the dream was weird and kind of gross, but I don't know why it felt so creepy. It was just the atmosphere.
I take a certain kind of antidepressants, and I forget to refill the prescription quite often. It's kind of idiotic of me, because I have a terrible reaction to going cold turkey off my medication, it's called SRI discontinuation syndrome. One of the symptoms is bad dreams, and they are very much the kind that make you feel wrong and ruin your day. I had one night of these dreams, I kept waking up and going back to sleep, and I had bad dreams every time. By the time day rolled around I felt kind of hysterical and the thought of having another night like that made me cry. I was off my antidepressants darn it, I cry easily. In any case, the only thing I actually remember about these dreams is a lot of vivid color. That's it, that's all I've ever been able to remember, but the feel of them was bad, like my brain was assuring me, "yes, this is really bad, this is awfullll, this green color reminds you of boogers, now scream in despair!"
So all in all, zombies and tornadoes and other things you're scared of, they aren't half bad to dream about, but fire ants or the vivid color of avocado? That's terrifying.

Cannibalism and Rescues of the Rodent Variety

      I was at my friend's house today. Her place is the sort of house where every time you're there you end up in a situation so ludicrous you never imagined it happening. Today's strange event was definitely exciting, but mostly sad. 

     It had reached the point in the day when my friend began to feed her animals. Though she lives in the suburbs, she has many, many more animals than the average person. Primarily, she has rats. She loves rats more than any other living thing, and she makes a bit of money breeding them. She has more than thirty rats, and they are scattered in cages all over the house. Most are in one of two cages, the boy cage or the girl cage (color themed, because it’s stylish), but others are housed elsewhere because they are new, they are moms with babies, they are sick, or they are too vulnerable, like her completely hairless rat, Ruguru.

     We had just started the feed the rats, and my friend was checking up on the newest mother and her three week old babies, when she found that the mother was gone. After a few seconds of searching, we found the mother in a dirty laundry basket along with a baby. This made us a bit nervous, as neither of us had considered that any of the babies would be out, and after doing a headcount we found that we were missing two of the eleven babies. Me, my friend, and my friend’s mother searched the entire room. The cats had been in the room overnight, and we thought that one of them would definitely eat baby rats if given the chance. The only thing we couldn’t understand was the complete lack of blood or hair.

     After roughly half an hour, my friend’s mom saw something red in the bedding of another rat cage. I opened the cage and pulled it out and found that I was holding a leg. I gingerly put it down amidst horrified cries, and searched through the rest of the bedding. I found the rest of the poor little guy a few seconds later. He had been practically skeletonized, only some fur and a little bit of flesh remained.

     My friend took his remains away, and I checked out the two rats who were inside the cage. They were the picture of innocence, running about and pressing against the bars, all excited to see me. I had trouble believing that they would have done something so horrible, but I don’t think rats think of things like eating babies in the same way that humans do. I looked closely at the two happy rats, and I found blood on their paws and whiskers. Case closed I suppose.

     There was still one more baby rat missing, and we looked around for another twenty minutes. No sign. My friend started cleaning other cages while we searched, and I looked around for any other place we hadn’t checked yet. My friend went outside to clean something and I walked to one corner of the room to see what she was doing. I looked down at a roll of chicken wire that was standing up in front of me.

     Lo and behold, the other baby rat was squeezed into it, her eyes were HUGE, and she was absolutely frozen. I reached into the chicken wire on either side of her, put my hands together under her so she couldn’t run further down, and drew her up. She didn’t struggle at all, and I could cup her furry cotton ball sized body in one hand. I lifted her up over my head and made excited squeaking sounds at my friend. She looked up and came running inside, where she took the baby from me and kissed and snuggled her.

     We delivered her carefully back to her mom, and moved them all to a smaller cage so they couldn’t get out again. For the rest of the day I told everyone about finding the living baby rat, I felt like a hero. Well, I still do actually, and now I’m writing this on the Internet so MORE people can read about it. So I suppose I feel the same, it makes me happy when I can save an animal, I wish we could have found them both before the Cannibal Twins had gotten the other one, but at least one survived. She’s back with her family now, hopefully not too traumatized, and she should go on to live a good and happy life.

British Television

My family have enjoyed watching shows from the UK for years, such as The Office, Jeeves and Wooster, and Pride and Prejudice (it was a miniseries so it counts as both a movie and a show in my book). I was introduced to Monty Python at an early age, and I knew the entire Holy Hand Grenade speech by heart at the age of 8. We love Doctor Who (everyone loves the Doctor, don't even pretend you don't), and now that we have the exciting online sections of Amazon and Netflix available to us, we try out a lot of shows. My father generally finds something important to do instead of television, which he regards as a pointless waste of time that could be used compiling bird information or reading Flannery O' Connor, so Mom and I get to pick what to watch, and we like to watch mysteries. British television has quite a selection of mystery shows, and because we think the accents are wonderful and we are totally well versed in Britishness we are generally drawn to them. Now that I have seen many UK adventure and mystery shows I have noticed something odd. British shows are much more soul crushingly depressing then any other shows I watch. I am used to the occasional sad episode in the American crime solving shows I see. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, sometimes the good guys don't save everyone, and once in a great while, a character you love will die (although generally the important character death that has been forshadowed by the media is that guy in background who is always eating cheese). Most of the time though, our heroes catch the evil people, save the last victim, and are entirely protected from danger via the Main Character Bubble of Invulnerability. It's only when a show is on HBO or described as 'gritty' that all bets are off. In the British shows, sad and hopeless endings are the usual, and happy endings are exceptionally rare. The murderer is going to go free because of lack of evidence even if the police walked in on him stabbing someone, any living victims or extra characters in a show will die messily, and every season or so they kill off a main character. My mother and I watched a British show called Touching Evil, starring the delightful Robson Green, Nicola Walker who is lovely but reminds me of an unpleasant person I know, and Rose's Tyler's father. We could never remember the name of this show so we preferred to call it Poking Evil and we had fun watching it. At first. I think each of the show's three seasons should have its own name, corresponding to how fun it is to watch. Therefore the first season is christened Poking Evil With a Stick (fun), the second is Evil Pokes You Back (not fun), and the third is Evil Goes to the Bathroom on You and Steals Your Clothes (don't watch it if you like being happy).
One of the more upsetting things that I find in these shows in something that I call the Purge. This is when every single character in a show is killed off and the entire cast is replaced by new folks. I never even knew a network could DO that. I stopped watching a particular show when I learned I only had one season left before everyone was murdered, including the baby. I stopped watching another one when I looked ahead and found out that the main character was going to be replaced no less then four times. Your main character should be a precious gem! You should take care of them and treat them well, going through FOUR main characters is simply negligent! If you did that with a dog you would be placed on a LIST and not allowed to have pets anymore.
Even Doctor Who, a remarkably fun show that is often considered to be for children is absolutely horrible about this. There are multiple deaths every episode, and very few non recurring characters make it through a visit by the Doctor (not his fault, just bad timing). My mother and I get sad every time the Doctor promises that he will save someone. I can't even think of a time when he promised to save someone and managed to pull it off.
I have watched British shows that were quite nice, and it's taken me several years to actually watch enough television to notice this, but it makes me unhappy. I understand when a show is trying to be realistic, but most real people have both good and bad things in their lives, and the characters in these shows basically have no good things at all. I often wonder how they keep going and don't lie comatose in bed all day. Oh well, I will continue to watch Doctor Who and that new mystery series that doesn't seem quite so bent on tearing viewer's hearts to smithereens. It's called Wire in the Blood (Robson Green kick, I have to see him happy somewhere), and you must believe me when I say that these characters seem to have reasonably good lives. Yes, they live by themselves and only have work and cops and crazy people for company, but they love each other, they occasionally smile and eat together, and one of them has a cat that hasn't been killed by anyone yet. It's a charmed life.