In Which We Add A Couple Of New Members To Our Household

I spent most of today doing light housekeeping and whatnot.  I've very quickly discovered that our laminate floors need to be vacuumed every day, as otherwise they quickly accumulate little piles of dirt, dust, cat hair, and unidentified bits of detritus that I don't want to look particularly closely at.  So that's the downside of the floors.  The upside is that I can actually see the stuff, so it makes me want to vacuum every day instead of whenever I get around to it.  I have no doubt that in the places we had carpet just as much stuff accumulated on a daily basis, only I didn't know about it because it was hidden in the carpet.  Gross.

Our old vacuum, while very nice, had those super-stiff revolving brushes that are supposed to scratch the heck out of your laminate floors.  So I got us a new, pretty inexpensive canister vacuum, which works really well and has the added bonus of being absolutely adorable.  This is the Herbie of vacuum cleaners.  It's bright orange and it has very large, cheery buttons and since it's a canister vacuum it follows me around like a little puppy while I'm vacuuming.  I find myself thinking about donning pearls, high heels and some sort of flowery apron whenever I use it, which given my usual level of domesticity makes it a really cute vacuum to have that sort of effect on me.

Jeremy and his mom were off at a sign language conference all day, so Connor and I had the house all to ourselves.  Well, except for the cats and our newest two members of the family that is.  Let me introduce you to:

Teke and Lili!

Bonus points for you if you get the extremely obscure literary reference-- especially since we split up the spelling. 

Anyway, they're the baby gerbils we brought home a few days ago!  Aren't they cute?  I think they even beat out the vacuum cleaner!  We got them for a couple of reasons; the first being my complete inability to resist any organic life form with huge eyes, but also because Connor has been sleeping in our room for the last five months since we couldn't turn the heat on in our apartment due to the necessary placement of Jeremy's hospital bed and my paranoid refusal to have a space heater on in a room I'm not physically in.  We felt like it might be a little rough on Connor to transition to not only a new house but to sleeping all by himself again, and so we got him the gerbils so he'd have company in his room at night.  He absolutely loves them, he spends a lot of time watching them, and he's having zero problems sleeping through the night, so I'm glad we got them. 

I apologize for the quality of the photos-- gerbils are hard to take pictures of.  For one thing they were terrified of the camera, and so whenever I moved it or depressed the shutter button they'd dart back into their little house.  As a result most of the pictures I have feature vaguely gerbil-shaped blurs.  There's also the fact that Teke (the brown and white guy) is about 8,000 times bolder than Lili (the all-gray boy), who seems to be shaping up to be a bit of a wimp.  All of Lili's pictures were blurry, so I posted the least blurry picture, which was taken with me standing on the complete other end of the room.  That was the only way I could get him to come out of his hidey hole while I was holding the camera.  Normally they're both pretty friendly, and I'm sure they'll get used to the camera eventually, but in the meantime this is what you're stuck with.  The fact that I'm also a near-incompetent with a camera and for every good picture I take of Connor there are 8,000 bad ones you don't see probably doesn't help either. 

The cats are normally not allowed in Connor's room, so nothing's really changed there except that whenever I go inside now they sit just outside and watch the door.  When I come out there are our two felines looming in a predatory fashion a couple of feet back, completely ignoring each other and staring at the crack under the door like small furry vultures.  I'm pretty sure they know what's up and are convinced that someday I'm going to lose control of one of the gerbils while cleaning the cage and they'll have the chance to rustle up their own fresh dinner instead of waiting for me to dispense it in kibble form from a bag in the pantry.  Hopefully this will never happen; I'm pretty sure that seeing one family member eat another might be mildly traumatic for Connor despite Jer's insistence that everything would be fine if we sang "The Circle of Life" during the chase and subsequent dining. 

But I wasn't quite up for a dog as of yet, and the thought of adding another cat to the mix makes me laugh until I have to sit down for a while and have Jer ply me with some sort of alcoholic beverage.  So we were left with small prey animals, and the gerbils had the largest eyes and as an added bonus were equipped with tails that reminded me of those of characters out of Fraggle Rock, so they were the logical choice.  Also they make very little mess, which is an added bonus.

Even if it gives me fewer opportunities to use my new vacuum cleaner.

~Jess