The arts and the rats

I finally finished this piece! It's the biggest picture I've painted in many years at 20' by 16'. Roughly taken three days and many, many layers and changing of my mind!



And now I'm tired and need to think of what I'm going to draw next. Definitely not as big as this one, I was thinking a landscape however we shall see.

On the rat front many things have happened in the last week. At the start of the week I had to make the horrible decision to put Arrow down as he was eating less and less and had no energy to do anything. I hate making that decision and I just hope it was the right one. I know he couldn't have ever got better but it still makes me feel awful for making it.

Jasper's brother (Felix) in the pet shop recovered and I picked him up on Wednesday. I was going to do a steady introduction over the following few days, temporarily leaving Jasper with the adults. Luck was in my favour on the Wednesday as I also found a rat cage advertised in the paper and it was exactly the right dimensions! As it is a rather uncommon cage to get hold of these days I was amazed that it was the exact one I wanted (it had to be a certain size in order to fit on top of my existing one and not be too big because of the weight issues).

Introductions between Jasper and Felix went okay on the Wednesday night but I put him back with the adults for the night. However the next morning Levi had decided actually he'd rather not live with Jasper anymore and bit him on the leg. This was five minutes before I had to get ready for work. Big arrgghhh moment. Basically to cut the story short the proper 'Jasper and Felix have to live with each other' came faster than my initial plans and I put them in the new cage and hoped for the best. Luckily they seemed more interested in exploring than each other! (I do come home for lunch so I could monitor them, I didn't leave them for an entire day unsupervised together!) And a few days on (now) I do catch them sleeping in the same igloo/castle so that's good, hopefully it will all carry on like that (well, at least Levi's happy, and probably Jasper a lot more!) The only slight issue after the changes is that the young ones barely come out at freeranging time. I don't understand why Jasper isn't that keen anymore but hopefully that'll change in a few days time.

- The Blogging Rat