Did you know rats could do this

I keep hoping it’s the last time but, if you’ve missed them here are the first, second, and third rat installments. When they’re not swimming cute little laps in the pond, the rats are drying off in the shade of the flowers, snacking on zucchini, taking ONE bite out of each unripe tomato, and of course working on tunnels. I feel differently about the rats every day, and the day I saw one swimming I obviously loved them.

My family likes to tell the story of my four-greats-grandfather, who invested all his money into a couple cows and travelled to America with them. On the ship, the story goes, there was a storm and the cows had to be thrown overboard. To make the ship lighter? To appease the gods? Because they were vomiting too much? To make the story more dramatic? I don’t know. But as a kid the thought of drowning cows always made me sad, so instead I imagined they’d become cow mermaids. That inspired the rat mermaid here, although rats are swimming just fine without fish tails.

Have you had any good animal sightings lately? We saw a baby possum (opossum for the purists) and we’ve had some really nice chipmunk sightings. This spring Kip and I saw this teenage robin.

Whenever Kip sits on the couch and stares into the middle distance I wonder if he’s thinking about that teenage robin, or if he’s thinking about whether rats can swim, or where he wants to pee next, or nothing at all.

This weekend we watched the Indigo Girls documentary It’s Only Life After All. We’ve been wanting to see it for a while (Boaz’s friend made it!) and I loved it.

I’ve also been eating a lot of frozen grapes, and I can’t recommend anything more. Our freezer is dealing with some health issues lately and can’t reliably keep ice cream cold, but it can do frozen grapes and they taste enough like ice cream that it works.

I hope your week is full of only the most pleasant interactions with rats, and you get to talk to all the people you love.