Albino Hog

A new hedgehog is coming! I'm ready for a new one, and she is as different from Sally Snert as it is possible for a hog to be and not start an entirely new coloration. New hedgie-pog is an albino! I will be getting her after the 17th. Hopefully she & Miss Felicity will hit it off. If you click on the title "Albino Hog," you'll go to my excellent breeder's site!

Mums for Sally

Here's a photo of the reason for this burial site. Beautiful, bright mums to honor Sally Snert's bright spirit. They have lasted & lasted.

Sally's Second Grave

Here is Sally Snert's final resting place. The lighter brown flecks are lemon verbena, scattered on her grave mound to repel cats & dogs. They are averse to citrus, from what I hear. And she has stayed safely buried so far. This site is much closer to my building, so I can check often.

The Burial Saga

And then, there are the perils of urban pet burial. Initially, I planned to bury Sally at my boyfriend's house, underneath a beautiful little old Japanese maple. However, he is trying to sell & he has raccoons around. How would it look to potential buyers if the coons were digging up the yard? Much less snacking on my little animal? So I picked a little hillock in the midst of my development of condos & townhomes. I never saw anyone walking dogs there, or really frequenting it at all, although it is close to a row of townhomes. So I buried Sally underneath a pretty bush & left a piece of statuary, (hedgehog fairies...they were tacky as all get out, but a gift) to mark the grave.

Then I checked on her every so often. The first thing that happened was that the hedgehog fairy statue disappeared. Ok, no biggie, Sally was still in the ground. I checked on her two days later, and she had been dug up! Sally was there, still wrapped in the pretty green fern patterned cloth I buried her in. But she was a good 3 feet from her grave. Something or someone had disturbed her. This was just getting worse. I felt like the broken marigold.

The Death of Sally Snert

Hello, Abandoned Blog. My little dainty hedgehog, Sally Snert, passed on in August. I noticed that she was shaking, just a little tiny bit, before I went away overnight. When I returned she was dead in the corner of the cage, prickled up & stiff. Poor, sweet little Snert.

Then, unfortunately, I FROZE her. Thinking that, ok, this will preserve her so that I can take her to the vet & the vet can discover what happened. Wrong. To have viable tissue to study, you must REFRIGERATE, not freeze.

So I will never really know what happened. It did seem to me that Sally Snert hadn't grown much, and she was nowhere near as large as Felicity. She was incredibly easy-going, but I wonder if that was because she felt sick? Snert also never, never made any noise. Perhaps something was wrong with her internally? Perhaps a kitty scared her to death? I will never know.

Tuesday Bluesday

Time to whine. I have a broken ankle that is now held together by a stainless steel clamp apparatus. My apartment is an incredible mess. My plants are dying. I am not eating properly. I am teaching two classes. I can't carry a cup of coffee for myself. My sweet little hedgehogs are not getting out of their cage much. I am so incredibly sick of seeing the above view! It's blue for a reason.

Something to look forward to: the cast comes off on July 16th.

Ouch!

A picture book featuring hedgehogs that is lower on my list of favorites is Ouch! by Ragnhild Scammell, illustrated by Michael Terry. It has cutesy cartoonish illustrations. The main character, Hedgehog, and the goat who solves the problem in the end are pretty charming, but their faces don't convey much expression. Also, the landscape is rather green & fruitful for a time when a hedgehog is going to sleep for the winter. The text and the illustrations match, but the pics don't add any depth or nuance to what's going on in the plainly told story.

The plot is based on the old folk idea that European hedgehogs are able to collect fruit and carry it away impaled on their quills. In Ouch!, an apple falls onto & sticks to little Hedgehog. She wishes to get into her nest to hibernate, but now she can't because she won't fit. Other animals offer advice, but when she tries to scrape the apple off, she always ends up with something more stuck in her quills. It's not particularly believeable, even for a fanciful picture book. The best part is when Hedgehog already has stuff all over her quills (Nuts? Really, you think nuts would stick?) and a small piece of blue paper flies through the air. Little Hedgie runs around to avoid it, but it floats right onto her back & sticks! Some days everything just gets all up in your quills...

An interesting facet of this text is the 26 page length. Most picture books are standard at 32 pages. The original UK publisher, Little Tiger Press, added in black & white activity pages in between the full color spreads. Good Books, the US publisher, has left these out.

An Amazon search shows that Scholastic has picked this text up & published an audiotape along with it, changing the title to Apple Trouble. I wonder why the title change?