I'D LIKE YOU TO MEET DAVE

This is Dave:



Along with all the activities we kept ourselves busy with this weekend, Ray and I also looked after Dave the Hedgehog. Dave is only a few months old and was found wandering around the parking lot at my office. This was bad news as hedgehogs are basically nocturnal and he shouldn't have been awake during the day, let alone far from a hedge and in the middle of the pavement where he could have been run over (poor hedgehogs have not evolved well alongside cars...instead of learning to run when they see an approaching vehicle, they go "eek!" and curl up into a ball right in the path of the car).

Dave was taken in by one of my coworkers who nursed him back to health and who has become, it appears, Dave's longterm caretaker. At this point in the winter most hedgehogs are starting to hibernate; Dave is still a runt and if he were to hibernate now he wouldn't have enough reserves to make it through the winter. So Dave has become an indoor hedgehog, one who quite happily curls up in his shredded paper on top of a heating pad and eats his custom-prepared meals from a spoon. I'm not kidding.

Dave has since been returned to Nick, but we sure enjoyed having the little critter around. He wasn't the most cuddly of pets, but docile and friendly nonetheless (but for that time he nipped Ray...must have thought his finger was a worm). I'm thinking that if we can handle a hedgehog, we're about ready to take on something bigger, softer, and more longterm...