The Ratty Troubles - or, an instant jet-lag cure

The little human went away, and then she came back. She seemed very tired in the mornings. The big human says this is called "jetlag". But the big human and me and mummy, we invented a jetlag cure. The big human makes a cup of tea and gets some breakfast cereal flakes. Then he takes us and the tea and the flakes down to the little human and puts us on her bed. We have a wonderful time running around nipping her nose and her toes and crawling into her clothes and loudly munching on the crispy cereal, and dipping our noses in the tea. It is our favourite fun time. In only a few minutes the little human is wide awake, but if she does fall asleep again we nip her on the nose until she wakes up. No more lazy mornings for the little human!

Nearly doubled

I am now 140g, which is nearly double what I weighed when I came into the new rat house 2.5 weeks ago. The smaller human tells me I am only going to be a little rat (who is she to talk!) but I am hopeful I will be bigger than Mummy, who is only 210g. For comparison, PhilBossRat is 550g!

It is not that clear in the picture, but I am developing some long hairs at last. You can see how my fur is lighter near my belly. Mummy says that they are called guard hairs and that the new fur will spread all over me from toe to tip in the coming few weeks. Soon I will be a grown up!

As you can see I have been reading a variety of books to improve my mind. In Japanese Buddhism you can gain wisdom by turning round a revolving library of books. In ratty Buddhism the same knowledge is gained by nibbling on a wide variety of books.

Movies

Lots of things happen in the new rat house that didn't use to happen at the old place. One of the most exciting is that we regularly get to watch exciting movies. One of the most inspirational ones was called Mission Impossible 2 which involved a human doing things like hanging from their finger tips from cliff edges as well as posing in order to look as pretty as possible.

Ever since we saw the movie, me and Mummy have been practising our moves. Of course we are both already more attractive than the actor so we don't need to practise that part. Hanging from fingertips does, however, require lots of practise. While Mummy has been jumping from the BIG human's shoulder to claim a fingernail purchase on the bookcase, I have been hanging off the smaller human's clothing by my toenails and then just when I am only hanging by only one toe I swing myself round and climb vertically to the human shoulder. This is a lot of fun and, since we hear that the lead actor role is now vacant, we are hoping that we will soon get offered deals to star in future Mission Impossible movies.

Unfortunately the humans' photography is really not very good so we are not sure that the talent scouts will discover us! This movie is of my Great Uncle Colin. As you can see he was a fantastic stuntrat in his younger days.