One: I've finally noticed that I was an idiot and forgot to update the Monday Mystery queueueueueueueueue. Fixng that. Just check the tag to get them.

Two: It is allergy time. Specific kinds of weather don't make me miserable per se; I just suffer when it changes suddenly, or if it goes abruptly from cold to warm and all the things bloom. I ran out of diphenhydramine a few weeks ago and the money had to go to something else, so I just sort of left it on the grounds of "that which does not kill me can be ignored indefinitely if I really put my mind to it." It is both one of my dumbest, and one of my most successful, long-standing policies in life.

I gave up and cadged some from Jazmin this afternoon. My sinuses finally got to the stage where I prefer to sleep sitting up, and the swelling gives me a chronic headache which nothing can stop. Also, my back hurts, my shoulders hurt, my knees hurt, and anywhere I've managed to scratch or scrape myself itches like fuck while it heals over. I don't know whether fatigue is a direct thing or just a knock-on effect of sleeping badly when my head is full. I've been grinding to a halt for no apparent reason. It's mystifying.

Clearly this shit does something for me other than just sticking a chemical cork in my nose, and I should not under any circumstances run out of it again. The pollen clouds may just have been the last straw, and now my immune system is all cranked up and unreasonably angry at me for not fixing the weather.

Three: The official RatCatcher NetTM has now been attached to das Rathaus. I like to keep the top door of their cage suspended out flat as a little porch, because I am a fundamentally lazy person and I don't want to have to open the damn thing every time I feel the need to pet someone. The rats enjoy this, because it means they can climb up and nap on the TOP of their HOUSE, which is very exciting. "Permanently open cage" is a terrible idea when they're young and a flight risk, so I hold off on it until I'm sure they recognize that their house is a place to run away to rather than run away from when they freak out, and until I'm sure they can be sanguine about it when one of them inevitably goes splut! and I have to reinstall him into his box by hand.

The RatCatcher NetTM is a hammock strung around the outside of the cage from one of the top corners to the open door. Rats climb up things pointy-nose-end first, which works fine. They also climb down things pointy-nose-end first, which works less fine. Their relationship with gravity is "complicated", in the Facebook status sense of 'unclear on boundaries and often adversarial'. I just teach them that they're only allowed to climb up and down that one corner of the cage, so that when they fuck it up, they fall right on their wee little faces into the net, rather than smacking into the floor from four feet up.

We had an unanticipated fire drill the other day. Nobody died or bit me for waking them up by rolling them into a bin of blankets, so I figure they're probably okay now.

Flathead spent about half an hour going ROOF! ROOOOOOOOOOF! ROOF ROOF ROOF HAHAHAHAHAHA I'M ON THE ROOOOOOOOOOF! He squoke preemptively every time I patted him on the head, thinking I was going to pick him up and put him back inside. (Rats vocalizations have a pretty broad frequency range. I can't hear the ritten calls, but at close range I can hear adult rat distress feeps, which are about 17-20kHz -- on the far side of CRT deflection whine. They sound like their little rat batteries are low. The loud scratchy squeaks that humans can hear easily are just the rat being indignant.) Then the novelty value wore off, and everyone found a box and went back to sleep, the end. Things that might come open if you work them right are way more interesting than things that are open already.

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