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.

Colin

Here is another one of the boys! Don't you think he looks a bit like me? It could be that he is my Great Uncle Colin! In the first picture Colin is about 3 months old. The second is a year later (yesterday). From looking at pictures on the internet he seems to be a blazed berkshire platinum, His eyes are ruby. Isn't it interesting how his colour has faded? Could he be a husky rat? Husky rats start off almost black and then get more and more grey through time, but I have not seen such a pale one before. Colin is a very interesting colour but he is a bit small and weedy. I am not so scared of him as I am of Billie! When he was younger he climbed around a great deal and was very athletic. Recently, when the weather got cold he developed a slight heat tilt. At first he was quite disorientated and frightened, but now he is getting more and more secure again. There are three possible causes of head tilt. It could have been an inner ear infection caused by mycoplasma pulmonis that all rats have, or it could have been a stroke. Pituitary tumours can also cause head tilts but since Colin is improving now, this seems unlikely. The first seems most likely since Colin also has noisy breathing , undoubtedly myco related. The strange thing is that he did not seem very ill when he got the head tilt. Perhaps it was only a relatively minor attack.