A little while later, she knows all the chords I do, can change chords in time (this is really hard at first, I struggled with it a lot, so did my pupil), and play all the songs I do! Look at her! Just beaming with all her guitar knowledge.

We even made up our own song! Which is sad… like, really sad. :/ I’ll post it sometime.

Well, Haniya is calling me… to do our daily guitar practice. What a coincidence!

So, there have been a few changes relating to the rats! I got a new cage (yes…  another). It is Petco’s Rat Manor and I love it. It’s supposed to be perfect for 3 rats and mine don’t seem limited in space in anyway. It’s also a breeze to clean and fun to decorate again afterwards. That’s very important, you see.

The cage with only a little decoration. Currently I have their wheel, a basket and more hammocks.

With my huge cage that I made with Mom a while ago, I took out the shelves and made the doors bigger and it serves as a type of “playpen” for the rats now. You are supposed to take your rats out every day for about an hour to let them run around and play and get a lot of the energy out (because, never fear, they have a lot). And this makes escaping from their designated play area impossible because it has a ceiling. Without further ado… here’s a picture of it.

So basically I just laid the cage on it’s back, the levels are out and I just put sheets or towels on the bottom with toys, hammocks, boxes, tubes in so that they can play for a while (an hour a day or so). After I take them out and return them to their other cage I just tip the playpen upright (obviously taking everything out first ) and I store it somewhere else. Doesn’t fit in me and Haniya’s room.

I’m really happy right now with how the rats are set up and systems that I’m using. I’ll make another blog post soon, “stay tuned”!

So, for Christmas, I got a guitar because I decided I wanted to learn it. I also know a little bit (two years of knowledge, actually) of piano but I’m out of practice. Anyway, it’s been about 3 months (I got the guitar at beginning of December) and I have been teaching myself to play with the help of online video lessons. I know a bunch of chords and I’m continuing learning more and I can play a lot of my favorite songs. It’s really, really exciting and I love it.

My guitar  

I’m still learning a lot (especially about strumming patterns, that is something that’s pretty hard to master) but it’s totally fun. I practice for about an hour/hour-and-a-half every day.

I’ll write again soon!

I think I’ve over-used the title ‘Update’ for my blog posts so I had to get creative here. :p Did I fail at the creativity? Probably. Oh and the picture of Miss Totally-Cute-Rat is one of my favorite pictures ever… The rat is Mattie! She’s definitely the most photogenic of all three of the girls.

(I almost lost this blog post so far because I hit the wrong button the computer just now… But I didn’t! *whew*)

So now I’ll get onto the news…

Tomorrow (probably, the plan isn’t completely finalized yet) our aunt, uncle and two cousins are coming to visit us over the weekend! Pretty excited about that…

Today I cleaned Mercy’s place-of-shelter (mini-barn) because it needed to be mucked out. I’ve been meaning to do it for awhile and the upcoming visit of family members got me motivated! Mission accomplished.

And now I will take one second to share a picture I took of Areli the other day. Have you ever looked closely at a dog’s eyelid? Here’s your chance, take a good look!

I tried to get a good not-blurry close-up picture of her eye for like… 20 minutes. She moves a lot! She got quite annoyed at me by the time I got this pic.

Hmmm, what else. OHHHHHHHH. I have some SUPER exciting news!!!! I got my headgear off FINALLY. Or, it would be neckgear, not headgear. Anyway, about 8 months ago the ortho office had me start wearing the neckgear only at night-time, which was nice, after wearing it for about 4 months almost 24/7 (the exception was when I was eating a meal). I think they sort of forgot I was still wearing it at night time so I asked them about it last appointment I had. The doctor said, “Oh! Yeah, definitely… you’re totally done with that.” Me: “REALLY?!” Doctor: “Yeah!” Me: “YAYYYY!” I could of hugged him.

Moving on…. I got an iPod Touch for Christmas (we celebrate Christmas early at our house… )! I’ve had it for about a week now. It’s realllllly neat… you can put all sorts of apps on it, it has a camera, music, internet, email, etc. I love it!

I’ve been re-organizing my room a lot lately. Well… I re-arrange my room a lot normally. There isn’t really a ‘recently’ about it. I get bored of how everything is arranged after about a week. And then after I re-arrange, I’m always say to myself, “Okay! This is cool, I’m gonna keep it like this.” …But I never follow through with that.

And now since I’m out of news, I’ll wrap this post up! TTYL, faithful readers of Nunomi!

It’s still under construction as far as setting everything up, so the theme will be changing a little as I go. The basics are set up though, so only a few minor tweaks will be made.

We also just last week took down all the beans. We grew a LOT of beans. The process of taking down beans is not an easy one… *falls to the floor* …First of all, we grew the beans on strings that were tied to the top of the cold-frame. The vines of the bean plant wrapped and coiled around the rope and used that for support. So basically, they’re growing vertically and when you pick, you just pull the beans off the vine and get a ladder for the higher up ones. Secondly, after I went and cut down the top of all the ropes so that the beans fell to the floor, we had to pull off all the beans still attached (we eat or dry those). As soon as that was done, we had to unwind all the rope that the beans clung to as they grew (because eventually we’d give all the vines to our friends’ sheep and we didn’t want them ingesting/eating the rope.). So then load up all the vines and take them to the sheep…. that is the process of picking beans! It took a couple hours, this is how many beans we got when we were done.

I do admit however, for the final stages of picking the beans… I kinda wandered off to play with the camera. Here are some of the pictures I took:

And then one of me picking tomatoes (taken by Mom)!

• First news: I got my ears pierced! It was done on September 7th. I’ve had them in for almost three weeks now! Just three more weeks to go before I get to take them out and put different ones in. I’m really excited about that.
• Second news: Ratatouille, my youngest rat, died a short while ago. I think he had an ear infection, I don’t know. He had a head tilt, which is usually a side-affect of ear infections. RIP, Ratatouille.
• Third news: Ratatouille was Ego’s (my other male rat) friend… so once he died, I had to get another friend for Ego. Rats are very social and should be kept in pairs or small groups. Introducing Bear! He’s quite small, probably only a couple months old.
  
• It rained since the first time in forever yesterday!!! Awesomeness. It absolutely poured for  3 or 4 hours. Outside smelled so GOOD afterwards… I drew you a picture of what it looks like outside!
• Areli (our dog) is getting SO big. She’s enormous. Gigantic. Huge. Pictures below!

  

  

  So that’s it for now on news… I hope you can read my handwriting on the pictures… See ya later!

Firstly, obviously (unless you’re reading this post from your email), Nunomi has a new look! It’s definitely my favorite so far.. then again they all have been my favorite at some point! But THIS one is different…. I promise… don’t you agree?

Second, I will be writing a lot about my rats. If you look up to the top, you’ll see that I’ve added a set of new pages (entitled, “Rats”). I’m going to be writing there about my experiences with the rats and very basic care of them — note, it’s based off of my own rats and what doesn’t and does work for them, it doesn’t necessarily apply for every rat.

Third, this isn’t added yet but I might be adding a place where I talk about my corn snake, Apple. Same idea as the rats, but about corn snakes. Still thinking about that though…

That’s basically all! If you have any questions…. you know where to ask them!
-Naomi

1. Plastic storage bins

This was my first way of housing the rats and was definitely the worst. I cut numerous holes out of the lid, and even cut out a big square in the middle of the lid and then hot-glued on fabric over that and it still had horrible ventilation (to the point of it being moist and humid in there all. the. time and also it fogged up in the morning). Moving on….

Pros:
1) Easy to clean
2) Easy access (just lift off the lid…)
Cons:
1) Horrible ventilation
2) Can’t hang anything (including water bottles, so I had to use bowls of water which got tipped over very frequently)
3) Poor visibility into the cage
4) Can’t stack the bins without cutting off the minimal air circulation on the bottom bin (as the holes are in the lid).

2. Rabbit Hutch

Basically a big rabbit hutch… nothing fancy (except the doors didn’t work great).

Pros:
1) Perfect ventilation
2) Wire sides (perfect for hanging things up)
Cons:
1) Not very easy to clean
2) Wood frame got smelly as I can’t clean it
3) Door wasn’t very easy to use
4) Spacing between the wires was 1” by 1”, which is too big for rats
5) The shape of it was big and square which wasn’t perfect for what I had to put it on (my dresser) — but I suppose that differs for every person

3. Aquariums

Nothing to explain here! Plain ol’ aquariums (glass sides & bottom, screen lid).

Pros:
1) Glass sides — easy viewing
2) Perfect for my rack of tanks
3) Good access
Cons:
1) Ventilation wasn’t very good, not nearly as bad as the bins, but was still not the best.
2) Can’t hang things up on the sides
3) Overall too small (although that couldn’t been fixed if we’d have bought a bigger tank, but I didn’t have the room)
4) Cleaning was a pain, as my 20G tank is heavy to move around.

4. Wire cages

Store-bought “small pet” cages…

Pros:
1) Wire sides — can hang things
2) Easy cleaning (plastic bottom)
3) Great ventilation
Cons:
1) It was too small. And I didn’t necessarily have room for a bigger wire cage.
2) Bar spacing was too big, small rats (I had a young male rat at the time) can easily sneak through.

5. Storage cubes

I used plain old wire storage cubs, put them together into a large cage, with doors. Then, since the wire spacing was too big (1” by 1”), I zip-tied chicken wire on top, which fixed the problem of the rats maybe escaping.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “wire storage cubs”, here’s a link to what I mean: http://stackablestoragecubes.org/Wire-Storage-Cubes.html
NOTE: Not the plastic ones, the wire ones.
Pros:
1) Good ventilation
2) Easy access
3) *Okay* viewing
4) Wire sides for hanging
Cons:
1) A pain to clean
2) It was a big mess… with zip-ties all over the place and chicken wire over the cubes. Wasn’t very appealing.
3) It fell apart pretty easily actually…
So basically that one didn’t work very well… Sigh. Onto another design!

6. Hardware cloth + J-clips

Basically there are no pros and cons with this one. It’s all perfect. Easy access, great viewing, looks clean and neat, easy to clean, nice and roomy (wait till you read the dimensions!)…. I can’t think of one single con. ;D SCORE!!!
Here’s how I made it:
The dimensions of the cage are 4′ high, 3′ wide, and 18″ deep.

It’s made out of two pieces of hardware cloth. One piece is the bottom, back, and top – basically I folded the hardware cloth to make three sides in one piece. If you understand me. The second piece was the sides and front.

Next came the levels. I had to add the levels before putting the two main pieces together because they wouldn’t fit through the doors and it’d be harder generally. I wanted the levels to be roomy, so there’d be space for hides (for lack of a better word, lol), toys, etc. So once I cut the pieces (14″ long and 18″ wide), I just had to J-clip them onto the “sides and front” piece.

Obviously the back would have to be attached to the levels too, once I secured it to the main structure. 

Then, putting both those pieces together (with J-clips again) I could secure the levels to the back and basically it was done except for the doors.

The doors were the easiest part. Just cut a big square out of the front, cut another piece (slightly bigger) and attach with … J-clips!  They make great hinges.

And of course you can’t forget the funnest part… decorating! I was in a bit of a time crunch so I had to quickly just add a few toys/wheels/hammock/etc. to make it at least a little interesting for the rats. 

I use towels for their “substrate” (okay, so that’s the word for reptiles… what’s the word for rats? Bedding? Yeah it’s basically their bedding ), but I used to use orchard grass hay… they liked to chew on it and burrow, make nests, etc., only trouble is since the sides are wire, all the little bits fall out and make a huge mess for me so… no more. I’ll stick with towels.

Without any frame or “hard” metal… it’s pretty sturdy! We got the stiffest hardware cloth we could find though, so that helped hold the structure.  I hope that all makes sense!

And… special thanks to Mom!! Who helped me plan and make this! Love you and thanks, Mom!

If anybody has any questions… leave a comment and I’d be happy to answer them!

So much has happened… 18 days ago I turned 12 for the first time in my life. Last week Haniya got her braces off, which was very, very, very exciting for her! She has perfect teeth now and smiles a lot bigger now (Just kidding! ). I’m doing pretty good with my own braces… I had 4 repositioned brackets (the bracket is popped off then moved to a different position on the same tooth) last week so I’m pretty sore from that — those 4 teeth are being tugged in a different and completely new direction so it causes a bit of soreness. But I’m mostly over that now.

On my birthday, I also caught 1 fence lizard, and shortly after that, another. They’re both living happily in one of my spare tanks and ate for me for the first time 3 days ago (a meal of entirely delicious pill bugs and beetles! YUM YUM! ). It was exciting and relieving. Names: Flint (female) & Steel (male). I’ll post pics soon!

My rats are doing brilliantly… I’ve had one litter of 12 pups already (which were unfortunately marked “snake food”). Another  litter is on it’s way (expected in the next few days). Excited about that! Pictures coming soon from the previous litter also.

The fish… I had one die a month or two ago so a new green glofish joined the crew. He has been named, “Mr. Green” and recently got married to “Darla”, the pink glofish. That’s basically all in the fish realm. Although I could mention that I moved the fish tank out into the family room (was previously in my bedroom) because the noise of the filter was finally getting to me after almost a year and a half. Very happy about the move and all my family gets to enjoy the fish now, now that they’re out in one of the main rooms instead of my bedroom!

Apple, my corn snake (named QT before I switched her name), is growing and has shed twice since I got her. Not sure how long she is exactly… Here’s a pic (that I edited ) of her:

Well that’s all for the moment… I’m exhausted. It’s been a long day! Talk to you all later…

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