Rat Replacement

A couple days ago, our beloved hamster died.  I don't know what happened to her.  She was fine Monday night when we took her out to play.  But Tuesday, Chuck came home from work, bent over her cage as he always does (cuz he thinks she's cute when she's sleeping), and asked, "why is she laying in the middle of the cage like that?"  Then he went into the bedroom to change his clothes, came out and checked on her again and said, "why is she limping?"  (I was too busy cooking supper to examine her myself).  Then about 10 minutes later, I heard Chuck say, "Oh no!!"  I looked over, and he was bent over her cage, and he said, "she's dead".

I don't know why she died. The gal at the pet store that sold her to me said that hamsters are supposed to live about 4 years.  She was only a year and a half old, and we took good care of her, so I don't know what happened.  Anyhoo, we are NOT getting another one, at least not at this time.  A hamster is one of those pets that I like to have only once in a while because I get tired of the smelly cage. ANYHOO.........................

Apparently Bossy felt that a house was not a house if it did not have a mouse, so she proceeded to get us another one.  Just hours later, and I do find this funny that this happened on the same day, I watched with amusement from the kitchen window, an animated cat trying to catch something in the weeds:

A few moments later, she came trotting toward the back door with something in her mouth.   All I knew was that it was "big" and it's legs were wiggling.  Gross!!  Ew! Gross! Ew!

Her plan was to run straight into the house with it, but Chuck stopped her in her tracks, slid the screen door shut, and said, "OH, No you don't!"

So she dropped her treasure right there in front of the door, I suppose waiting for us to let her in.

She waited, and waited:

and finally figured out that we did not want to keep her new pet.

So she played with it until it was dead, and went back out into the weeds to catch another one.

Luckily, she came back into the house when we called her cuz otherwise we might have had a whole collection of shrews to choose from, all dead of course, and what would we do with a dead shrew, anyhoo?

On another note, I had another setback with my garden.  Can you guess?  The moose came back.

She chewed down my broccoli, beat greens, and cabbage again.  And also chomped my peas half way down.  It's like she knows exactly when to come back - after she's given it time to regenerate itself, and just when I have hopes again that I might get to enjoy it, she comes back and helps herself, and has the gall to not even leave a tip! We've had a mama moose and two babies running around in this area this whole summer, and I'm pretty sure it's them cuz I'm seeing smaller hoof prints in my garden as well as the big ones, and I get reports from my neighbors that they have been chasing them away.  

She was gracious enough to leave this though:

I find it backwards that we humans have to glean after an animal, instead of the other way around. Where's the dignity in that?

As for my pumpkins, this is what I got:

You can't really tell in this picture, but I have lots of these female buds coming and going on the vines.  They get to a golf ball size, and then they turn yellow and die.  I don't know if that means they were never fertilized?  Anyhoo, see the green squiggly thing that's attached to the maltese cross stem?  It's hanging on pretty tight, but I guess that's what those green squiggly things are supposed to do.  The annoying thing about those maltese cross flowers - they are pretty, but they get so tall that they fall over.  This one fell over next to my pumpkin bed, and the pumpkin vine grew long enough to reach it, and now I don't know if I should leave it alone, or unsquiggle it.  

(Why am I suddenly thinking about "Squiggy" on "Laverne and Shirley"?)