Hooray! The wheel arrived! Yahoo! And so on.

I had to go pick the package up from UPS, and while I really hoped it was the wheel, I figured it was probably the little house. But when I saw the giant package I knew the truth. That thing's big. Okay, I got the larger size, but it was still bigger than I expected. But light. The better to be silent. Oh yeah, baby.

So there was the usual frustration factor of actually attaching it to the cage, because the cage I'm using is apparently non-standard and it's not very interesting to go on about but it got a little annoying what with Scooter trying to hop in and sniff and chew everything and, well, y'know. But eventually it was attached, and I let Scooter go forth to test it out. First he ignored it, because now that I wasn't trying to shove him away so that I could fuss with it, where was the fun in trying to get at it? Grr.

Then he played with it for a while. He sat up at one end, grabbed it, and spun the thing. It was like he'd seen The Price is Right and was hoping to get into the Showcase Showdown. Finally he started experimentally hopping into it. It took a while -- I guess the surface is so smooth that it's a bit slippery, so he'd jump into it and slip and then hop out, scared. But finally he worked it out, hopped in and experimented with running. It was more of a trot at first.

The guy who invented that should get an award. Man. Yes, it really is silent. Okay, maybe it'll start to make noise at some point, but because the construction doesn't involve a frame and spokes, I'm not sure what there is that could start squeaking. The only noise Scooter made was the sound of the cage shaking a little, which happens no matter what. Oh, all right: and I could hear his feet going pit-pat on the wheel. I really doubt I'd be able to hear that from more than a few feet away, though. It was almost $100, and having seen it in action, I'm fine with that. Ah, quiet.

And now I can watch Farscape tonight without having to distract him from running. Run all you want, you little rodent! Hah! No more treats for you! Well, not for that. I'm sure I'll find other reasons.

Watching Scooter figure it out was fun, too. There's less friction when it turns, so he seemed startled by how quickly it would move, and how long it would keep rocking after he stopped. I thought I might get seasick watching him bob back and forth as it slowed down. The first few times he tried it, he'd stop it, uh, "manually" by leaning out and bracing his front paws on the fiddlesticks. Which is, duh, pretty cute.

I think I've established (to myself at least) that Scooter learns pretty quickly. So now I'm starting to wonder if I'm teaching him all the wrong things.

Not all, I guess. But some.

See, Fridays at 10 I watch Farscape. Which means that for an hour, I'd like it if Scooter wouldn't run in his wheel. Because it makes noise and it's hard to hear the TV over that. So if he's awake then, which he usually is, I try to distract him. Tonight I cleaned out his cage, and refilled the bowls with food & hay (er, I do that more than once I week, of course) and then Farscape started. And as usual, I had some treats and things ready so I could distract him from the wheel.

The first fun thing was that I played tug-o-war with him over the cuttlebone. I just shoved part of it through the bars, and he kept trying to pull it away, and got really frustrated because he couldn't just pick it up and throw it onto the bottom of the cage. Which is what he always does with it, for reasons I don't understand. I think it's part of the constant effort to make sure the gravity is working. Anyway. Then I broke off a small piece so he could hold it and chew away, and that went over well. And then he started to use the wheel, and I had to offer him a couple of treats so he'd come sit quietly and eat. I did hit on one brilliant idea.

I got this Petromalt stuff, it's a hairball remedy. With malt flavor! Mmm, I guess. Anyway, I just give him a teeny bit every few days, because it's for much larger animals. Much to my surprise, he really likes the stuff, and normally I just put a little on my finger (it's like paste) and he nibbles it off. Usually without biting my finger accidentally, which I appreciate. So my brilliant idea was to put some of it on the edge of the cuttlebone piece. And then I wedged it into the bars so he couldn't pick it up. The end result was that it took him a while to get all the Petromalt off, and he also went into some entertaining contortions to get at it.

I finally gave up for the last act of the show. Plus, it was about that time that I wondered if he might start to realize that if he got in the wheel he'd get a treat. I don't think he remembers that lesson from week to week, but he'll learn something at least temporarilly after just a couple of repititions. So in the course of an hour of television he probably would notice: "Huh, every time I get in the wheel, she calls me over for a treat. Score!"

Scooter got new toys. And... stuff. I'd ordered from ChinWorld and it seems like anyone with a chinchilla and a computer would already know about them, but I'm happy to give them a plug anyway. I ordered the stuff on 6/15, and it would have arrived on Monday but I always miss the UPS guy. And it was coming from California, so that seems pretty prompt to me.

I ordered some food pellets, which I wasn't going to do, but their prices are so, so much cheaper than at my local pet store. I threw some of it in with his old food, because like a lot of animals they can be fussy when their food gets changed. Hopefully he won't notice. I'm having trouble believing that one brand of little processed food pellets will taste that different from another, but we'll see.

And I got hay cubes, too, which were very cool. I'd been getting the loose hay, and that stuff is such a pain. Because the bags are overstuffed, so while they're technically resealable, you have to take out a lot of hay before that's feasible. And the stuff falls out of the bag when you pull it out, and then it falls out of the cage, and it clogs up the vacuum, and it's just a pain. So these cubes seemed promising: it's just pressed into little one-inch cubes. I gave Scooter one and he started gnawing at it, but they're kind of unwieldy that way. However, you can break them up very easily into more manageable bits. And it's still not the mess that the loose hay is. I'm so sold on this stuff. Okay, the one down side is I think the little hay-rack type thing I have is now useless. You could put the cubes in there, but Scooter wouldn't be able to pull them out, and if you break them up, they'll fall out of the rack. But it was cheap, so I'm not concerned about tossing it.

And they sent me a free sample of "Nibble Rings." More food. Scooter didn't seem to like the one I gave him, but again, that may just be because he's not used to them.

I also ordered a couple of cuttlebones. Dude, chinchillas have the strangest supplies. It's a very brittle shell. Yes, it's another thing to chew. Plus they're full of calcium and that's good for him. It's actually a few inches long, but it's very light, and breaks pretty easily. I just put the whole thing in to see what he'd do, and that was fun. Because it's large enough that it's kind of hard for him to handle it, but it's light enough that he can hold it up in his front paws and gnaw on it. Which is, needless to say, quite cute. He really liked that.

And as if that weren't enough chewing action, I got a couple of little perches. Not fish. They're little blocks of wood with bolts, so you can fix them onto the cage wherever you want. I got two, and I'll probably order a couple more so that I can get rid of one of the damn ramps. I really don't like those ramps. You can only arrange the levels in one way if you use them, because they pretty much determine how far apart you set the levels. Plus I just don't like that they aren't solid. Scooter doesn't seem to mind, but that also makes them lighter so when he hops around on them they rattle and, well, they're just annoying. The two perches I have now, I set up so that he could hop from one to the next and then into his house, which is now hanging up high again.

And, as I mentioned, they're wood, so he can chew them. A large portion of my life seems to be dedicated to finding things for a rodent to gnaw. That's a little depressing when I think about it. So I'm gonna stop thinking about it now. The brilliant part of this is that Scooter will sit on one, then lean down and gnaw at it. It seems like that wouldn't be very adaptive. I keep picturing Wile E. Coyote scenarios, where he'll gnaw through the perch and tumble down. I guess that would take a while, though.

Of course, the fun part of all this was setting it all up. I tried rearranging the levels a little, and my comments about the ramps can tell you how well that went. It's a little better, but there wasn't too much I could do. Then I spent a while figuring out where to put the perches and the house so that he could get to everything, and it took a little while. Plus Scooter kept getting in the way, and well, yeah. It got frustrating, but I finally got it pretty well arranged, I think.

Then Scooter got to run around and find all the new things and check out the perches and bounce around. And he got a bath, whee. It's neat to watch him discover where everything is, and get more and more confident about hopping up onto different things from further away. Plus he started working out strange routes to things that involve jumping instead of walking. Um. I'm having a really hard time explaining that without diagrams. Basically, instead of walking up a ramp that goes directly to where he wants to be, he'll hop onto something that's in the wrong direction but higher up, because from there he can hop to the top of the ramp. It's a longer distance to travel, but he can cover it faster. Yeah. I think that actually made sense.

I don't think I'm just ascribing intent when he was actually hopping around at random, because he did that to get up to where I was offering him a treat.

The exercise wheel didn't come with this order (I'd ordered it at a different time, and I can believe that it might take a little longer since I think the actual manufacturer is overseas or something). And I'd ordered a little "chin box" -- just a wooden house he can sleep in or whatever. It's all wood, with no nails or screws, so he can also eat it all up. Yum. I figured, if he has that, I can change the fiddlestick thing -- right now it's sort of an arch, and he'll sleep under it. So I'll replace that as his sleeping quarters with the box, and then I can use the fiddlesticks (man, I feel dopey typing that word out) to make a ramp or something.

No, taking it all back now: Scooter's a dope. His new hobby is biting the wire that holds the water bottle on the cage. Which would be dumb anyway, but in the process of pulling at the wire, he sometimes manages to pull it completely off the cage. At which point the bottle falls to the floor.

I yell at him when I catch him at it, and he seemed to stop doing it for a while, but now he's back at it again. About a week ago I came home, puttered about, and at some point noticed that the water bottle wasn't on the cage. Figuring that he might have been without water all day (idiot!) I held it up to the cage, and he immediately ran over and started chugging. So I assume he'd managed to dehydrate himself a bit. Dumb, dumb rodent.

After that, I moved the bottle so it was at an upper shelf, instead of the bottom of the cage. But then I cleaned out the cage and remembered why I'd kept it at the bottom. This is the best of three (!) bottles I've gotten, because it doesn't leak very much at all. But it does still drip a little because if it didn't, it wouldn't be much use as a water bottle. And Scooter leaves droppings all over his cage, which are normally tidy little dry pellets. Unless water has leaked out onto them -- then they're really gross. Ugh. So yesterday I moved the bottle back to the bottom, where it just drips onto the bedding.

And already he's started pulling at the wire again. Sigh. I just looked up and saw that he'd once again climbed up so that his back was resting on the wheel, and was tugging the wire. I said "Scooter!" and he jumped down, but I'm not always here to catch him at it. Maybe I'll move the shelf down so there's less room for him to climb up to the wires, and see if that stops him.

I know there are bottles that effectively bolt onto the cage, although I'm not sure they're designed for the cage I have. I probably could find one that is, though. I just hate to get a new bottle when this one is so nice and easy to use, plus then I'll have to unbolt the stupid thing to fill it. I think I'll take pliers to the ends of the wire, so it doesn't slip off the cage as easily. I can still slide the bottle out that way.

Stupid rodent.

Last night Johanna and Katie came over, and Scooter went a-roaming for our entertainment. There was much "aw"ing. He kept trying to eat Katie's feet, for reasons we have yet to determine. The highlight was that at some point, I leaned down and called to him. Normally this gets no reaction whatsoever from the rodent. This time, he scampered across the floor and then hopped up into my lap. Which wasn't at all what I expected, so of course I started, and he jumped down and ran away. Oops. Sorry, Scooter. But I didn't expect him to hop up towards my face! Maybe he was trying to rip my throat out. It's hard to remain calm in the face of that kind of threat. Then I felt bad for discouraging utterly adorable behavior. Oh well.

Since I was sitting in the chair by his cage, my guess was that the hop up meant he was ready to go home, so I pulled out the dustbath tray, he hopped in, and I returned him to his cage. And I gave him treats and a toilet-paper-roll to chew, to make up for being terrified of him before. Poor little guy.

Scooter is smart. Shut up. Actually, I'm going to disprove that statement almost immediately. See, there are these sticks that I wedge into his cage in various ways to make fun things to climb and chew. And if Scooter would chew them in the middle, it'd work out fine. But no; he's taken to gnawing at the ends. There's one stick that he's pulled out of the bars I've stuck it into a few times, so that he can eat it more effectively. This, obviously, makes the sticks slightly shorter, so that they no longer can be fixed in place the same way.

So a few days ago I was cleaning his cage, and pulled everything out, and had a hell of a time trying to create the traditional "perches" for him because of this problem. I worked something out eventually, but I guess it's not as good as it used to be. Because there was one place where two sticks meet where Scooter used to sit, and he doesn't do that now. I think the sticks aren't meeting at the right angle to make a good seat for him anymore. This would be so much easier with visuals, I know; you'll just have to trust me. Anyway, this made me a little bit sad, because I think it's cute when Scooter perches on his little sticks and stares out at the world. Sure, I think it's cute when he does anything, but that's not the point.

Since my cuteness quota wasn't being met, I had to take action. I tried to lure Scooter up onto his old perch, using raisins as bait. It took a while; I had to get his attention, and then move the raisin so that it was over the cage in such a way that he'd have to climb onto the sticks to get close to it. I think he got a little confused; he tried stretching up toward the top of the cage, and then I'd say, "No, no, get on the stick!" and it as frustrating for us both. Finally, though, he hopped up, and I gave him a raising, and he immediately hopped back down to one of the shelves to eat it.

A marginal success, at best.

Feeling determined, I pulled out another treat and held it in the same place. This time he understood, and hopped back onto the sticks, snagged the disturbingly bright green pellet, and stayed on his perch to eat it. Yeay! I figured that was enough treats for one evening, and went off to do whatever the hell else it is I do to entertain myself.

The next night, I figured I needed to reinforce the perching behavior if I really wanted him to do it on his own. So I pulled out the treat box, picked out something yummy, and readied myself for another test of my patience, since I assumed I'd have to do the whole, "No, no -- just sit on the stick!" thing again. But no! I held up the treat and Scooter immediately jumped onto the Perch of Cuteness. So smart! Wow!

While some friends were over last night, I let Scooter out to show off his cute-itude. He discovered a new place to explore: usually I'm sitting at the computer while he runs around, but since I wasn't this time, he was able to hop onto the chair, and from that onto the table I use as a desk. So he sniffed around up there for a while, and then just posed nicely so we could admire him. Johanna said he was trying to find some way to communicate with us, because first he was sniffing the keyboard, and then he picked up a pen cap. And then he tried to eat the pen cap, which I think disproves the communication theory.

I did not imagine that Scooter was climbing on top of his wheel. So there. I didn't imagine that there was a centipede in my bedroom; I didn't imagine that Scooter climbed on his wheel. I must learn to trust my instincts more. Or at least my vision.

I was sitting at the computer, singing (badly) along with Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs, which isn't nearly as cheerful an album as the title would make you think. But that's what I like about it. The computer faces the living room, so I can see Scooter's cage to the right of the monitor. And yet another thing that I am not imagining is that, if I lean slightly to the right to see what Scooter's doing, he notices the movement and stops what he's doing. I really think he doesn't so much see objects as movement. Anyway, because of this I've gotten in the habit of sitting a little to one side, and glancing over at the cage without moving my head. A couple of hours ago I do this, and clap a hand over my mouth so that I won't start laughing and scare Scooter. Because he's climbed up the cage wall, using the bars as a ladder, so that he's squeezed in between the wheel and the cage. I keep looking, because I'm wondering if that's what he's doing when he knocks the water bottle off the cage. And he stretches up a little higher, and leans back, and he's now resting on top of the wheel on his back. At which point I cannot help but laugh. It looks like he's turned the wheel into some kind of New Age back-massage device. For all I know, he has.

Of course, the noise startled him, and he jumped down, but that does seem to indicate that I really did see him sitting up there, squished between the wheel and the shelf. That's one point in the "Strega's not insane" column, which I find pleasing.

Then I decided that maybe the cage gymnastics also supported my theory that Scooter was going stir crazy. But I haven't really done much cleaning because I was out over the weekend, and then I was out late last night, and today was just a frustrating day so I was in no mood for chores when I got home. I wanted to let Scooter out, but not enough to go through a lot of effort for it, y'know? Luckily, a compromise occurred to me.

Hello, giant gerbil ball. I've missed you. I put him inside, and Scooter took a few minutes to remember how to work the silly thing, but he got the hang of it again pretty quickly. He ran around the living room, and still remembered how to steer. He still bonked into things sometimes, but mostly he'd just run back and forth across the room. And he worked up some speed on a few passes, too, which is another indication that he needed some play-time. So that was good, and then I put him back in the cage and gave him a treat and a dustbath, and he seems a litle less, well, insane now.

I'll clean soon, I promise. I need to wash dishes, too, and once I get started on one homemaking task I usually get pretty into it for a few hours. But that cage-climbing act is awfully funny.

Okay, okay! I've been nagged about providing more Scooter updates. Sorry.

While I was on vacation in Toronto last weekend, Kelly came by to tend the rodent. But, because I suck, I haven't yet talked to her about how that went. I'm guessing she came by in the afternoon, because all of last week he was on a schedule where'd he be asleep all evening, and I'd only see him awake in the early morning. Which is why I don't have much to say about him, since lately he's been asleep when I've been home and awake.

In annoying news, he's found a new way to vex me. A few weeks ago I caught him reaching up to gnaw on the wire that holds his water bottle onto the cage. Because it's not like there's plenty of wooden things to chew in his cage. Grr. I yelled at him when I noticed him doing it, but that doesn't seem to have dissuaded him. In the past week, several times I've discovered that he pulled the wire off the cage, causing the water bottle to fall to the floor. Which means he has no water for a while. Stupid rodent. I kinda wonder if he's doing that because I haven't let him out of the cage all week, but I had a suitcase to unpack (shut up) and crap all over the living room (no, really: shut up) and I was tired and he can just cope, damn it.

Oh yeah: this was just freaky. Saturday I woke up early, wandered out to the living room and watched TV/dozed for a few hours. At some point a very odd noise woke me up. I'm still not sure about what I saw, because I was half-asleep, but bear with me. I sat up and turned, and it really looked as if Scooter had climbed on top of his wheel, and was just perched there in a wobbly way. My moving scared him, of course, so he immediately jumped onto a shelf. Later I tried to figure out if he could have been doing something else that would have looked like that -- like he was on one of the levels at an angle that would have made it look as if he was on top of the wheel, but I don't think that's what happened. When I was describing this to Katie and Johanna, I started to doubt that there was even room on top of the wheel for him to stand (since it's under one of the levels). However, I checked and there is a couple of inches of room, so he could fit there if, for some freakish reason, he decided that would be a fun thing to do.

So, yeah, I suspect he's going stir-crazy in his cage and needs some running-around-the-house time. Which I would have done tonight but I'm So Tired because Johanna and I went to visit Katie and Aaron last night, and it was very fun, but I'm very sleep-deprived now.

Scooter is currently chewing apart a toilet paper roll. He loves them. It's fun to bend it a little so you can poke it through the bars of the cage. He'll immediately grab it and start pulling, and his little feet start to skid on the shelf while he tugs as hard as he can. So far I've resisted the urge to suddenly let go and see if he careens across the cage; it's more fun playing tug o' war with him. He usually takes a day or two to finish devouring the whole thing; I guess he likes the rolls because he can chew them up so easily.

You've all been dying to know if I talk to Scooter, I'm sure. Of course I do. Although often it's to insult him. Like, if I'm sitting on the couch reading, and suddenly stretch out my leg which inexplicably causes Scooter to startle and run around in his cage, I reassure him by saying, "Calm down, freak." I call him a freak a lot. But with love, honest. There's also a lot of rhetorical questions like, "Who's a cutie?" and "Want a yummy dried berry?" and "Who's got a fuzzy belly?" That last one is generally followed by "Oh, poke in the belly!" while I rub his stomach.

The only time I "yell" at him is when he's running around the living room and tries to eat something outside of his normal diet, like my books, or an electric cord. Then I just say "Scooter!" very sharply and he usually knows he should stop. If that doesn't work, I start toward him (or flap a book at him noisily) and he runs off to find some other kind of trouble to get into.

Oh yeah, and when he has his freaky night terrors, or whatever they are, and suddenly starts yelping, I go for the soothing, "Scooter, it's okay." He does usually stop as soon as I say something, but I still can't figure out why he does it at all. At least I've devloped an automatic response to it; when I've crashed on the couch and he wakes me with his panic attack, I can usually quiet him without completely waking up.

I also talk to inanimate objects, and myself, so I think talking to a rodent is comparatively sane by comparison.