I hear there are people out there who don’t like animals, or have no desire to keep a pet.  I’m even related to a few.  While I’m sure it must be difficult to sleep at night knowing they haven’t got any pitter-pattering or chicken-scratching feet around their home, I’m here to tell them they can rest easy.  We’re looking after their share.

Our latest addition to the animal brood is four gerbil sisters, adopted just shy of a week ago.  We’re calling them the Spice Sisters.

Salt, Pepper, Ginger and Curry.  You can tell it’s Ginger and not Curry because she has the white on her tummy.  If you can’t tell Salt and Pepper apart, you need more help than I can give you. 😛

We’ve been planning and scheming in this direction since the middle of December, and talked about a rabbit, hamster, guinea pig (for some reason, our guinea fowl nixed that one–afraid of the competition, if you ask me) and penguins.  Of course we had to veto that last one, as we haven’t been officially declared a zoo.

When we settled on gerbils, we planned to bring home three if they were boys, two if they were girls.  That’s what the books recommended, and it sounded good to us.  Somehow that multiplied into four girls…which may be why one proposed set of names for them was One, Two, Three, and Five.  Cause that’s they way we do math.

The first day we set up the tank, their new home looked like this:

It’s got a wheel, food dish (buried), water bottle, house, and a few toys.  Not bad, for their first day home.

Less than a week later, their pad looks like this:

It’s got all of the above, plus a new and improved chewable house and two extra levels with a hammock, rolly house, sand dish, bottle cave, and more toys.

Remember what I said about our kind of math?  Well, I think it applies to English, too.  We now have an official new term for the kind of expansion you see in the second picture.  It’s called gerbling.

Gerbling [gerb-ling]  The act of sitting before a gerbil tank, watching the gerbils.  Also, adding to the gerbil tank, planning new gerbil items, or creating new gerbil toys.

We’ve also found that gerbling can be addictive, and needs a regular ‘fix.’  Should I be concerned?

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