Introducing Noodle E. Monkey

Now that finals are over and I am back in York with only the meeces, I finally have the time to post some pictures of our newest rattie aka the rat that Ricky said we were never going to get at Rodent Fest.

Ricky, myself, and a friend from college got up early Saturday morning to take the 2 1/2 hour drive up to Reading, PA for the Spring 2009 Rodent Fest. We got lost, our directions instructing us to drive through the beautiful town of Reading instead of heading north to the Leesport Farmer's Market. We stopped off at a Valero where the woman working there informed us that we, in fact, did not need to go through the entire town and up a mountain, and then commented that we were not the first group of people that morning inquiring about directions. We decided not to tell her what we were doing there to avoid the strange looks.

We arrived at Rodent Fest to the sound of an annoying rock caught up underneath the car and us frustratingly blaring the Mars Volta in order to drown out the sound. As soon as we entered, we were crushed by an overwhelming crowd of people and a space twice as big as the Fall festival. Children were running around everywhere with their new pet mice and rats in Critter Keepers, and breeders and rescues overwhelmed with crowds of people surrounding their rodents. Our friend bolted off to say hello to her friends from the New York Rat Meetup, while I tried to talk to Mike of Mikiodo Mice, who was surrounded by at least 20 people trying to buy his already reserved mice.

So, instead, Ricky and I headed over to Shylah, owner of SNR House of Rats, to see the two ratties our friend had reserved, Angel of Mercy and Nemesis, the former being a very large and silky-furred gray hooded female and the latter a rex chocolate berk. As Ricky entertained himself with some of the big male rats that Shylah's husband let him hold, I set out to find available female mice to add to the Project Runway crew.

In the entire showroom, all but three were reserved.

Kicking myself for not making a reservation before the show, and also surprised, since there were many mice available at the Fall show, I acquired the cards of the mouseries there and decided to wait until the fall to get a few more girls. I then headed over to a rattery from Michigan and fell in love with a four-week old dumbo russian blue patchwork hairless kitten (yes, baby rats are called kittens), and begrudgingly walked away when Ricky beckoned me over to the SNR table. He had suddenly decided that getting a two-pound miniature groundhog of a male rat was the new thing, and while I tried to hold the lazy boy, called up his parents. His mother, who had the watch the girls while he was traveling around Europe for three weeks, balked at the idea of watching boys too, and the idea of getting boys was put on hold for another season.

However, I think we are still very interested in the possibility of having two big lazy fluffballs to watch TV with, so the possibility of males in the future, especially neutered males, is still around.

I then wandered over to Haskell's, where Ricky and I both saw our little Noodle, a dumbo russian blue agouti (same coloration as Peaches) fuzzy hairless, a hyper four-week old kitten that jumped right onto my hand and demanded my warmth. We snatched her up in less than twenty minutes of deliberation. By the end of the show, we had accumulated a new baby for us, two girls from SNR for our friend who couldn't come, and our friend got two babies, a beige and a chocolate rex, to keep her girl Trill company.

Laden with five ratties, we tumbled back into the car and began to drive away, when the annoying rattling from the car turned into a full-out scraping sound. Annoyed, I climbed out of the car and laid on the parking lot and looked underneath the car.

Now, I have had experience with roadkill and dead things, especially on Pennsylvania roads, getting up into cars, but I have never had the experience of seeing something that had obviously crawled up into the car and died fall back out, with certain car parts attached to it. I half-screamed and Ricky dashed out of the car, thinking that the worst has happened ie engine was about to fall out. I picked up a random board laying near the market building and beat the dead skin and fur thing from a loose non-essential covering, but failed to pry the dragging cover off from the car. Withat least a part of the dead animal off, we continued to drive away the screeching car part that finally fell off somewhere in southern PA.

Ricky refuses to take the car to an auto shop. I think part of the dead thing is still in there.

Besides that, we had a wonderful time at Rodent Fest. I caught up with some of the people from the Fall show, pet the skunk, and talked Project Runway for a while. And now, here is Noodle E. Monkey: