Tamar's Corner turned one year old this week! Happy Birthday to my blog! Yes, I know that was cheesy. Anyway, I missed the actual birthday, which was on the first day of Chol Hamoed. I started it that day because I wanted to do something to cheer myself up after being annoyed at my father for buying a guinea pig. That's ironic, because the saga of our pigs ended (almost) this week too.
Now that I'm on the subject of the piggies, I should wrap it up. So here we go:
First there was Lucy. I don't really know where that name came from, if it was originally Lucy as in
I Love Lucy or not. In any case, it was Lucy, and the woman who worked in the pet store said she was pregnant. We were told that guinea pigs are happier with company, but if we were expecting babies, we weren't exactly about to buy two of them. And when the babies came, we'd figure out what to do with them.
The babies never came. Apparently Lucy wasn't really pregnant.
So we got another pig. We made sure to get another female so we wouldn't have to deal with guinea piglets, and it was obvious to all of us that her name was Ethel.
A few months later, three guinea piglets appeared in Lucy and Ethel's cage. By the next morning, there were only two. Now, six months later, the third one is still classified as missing, but we have our ideas about what happened to it. When they were old enough, my father took the two remaining babies to the pet store and got a credit.
It looked like Ethel was the mother, but we really didn't know. And then it happened again, when I was already in the U.S. Another baby appeared.
Now by this point, my mother, never much of an animal girl, had been lobbying for my father to get rid of the pigs for awhile. Probably about as long as we'd had Lucy, I'd say. She argued that they smell, they make a mess, and they have unwanted babies. She had all of her daughters behind her.
It was therefore decided that Lucy had to go, because, as my mother said, "He fathered too many children." The way I see it, that's quite an accomplishment for someone named Lucy. They couldn't take her back to the store, of course, so they gave her to Ein Yael, this "living museum" place with a petting zoo.
When the rest of my family went to America, they gave Ethel and the latest baby to the neighbors to watch. When we came home, with no intentions of getting rid of either one of them right now, we decided they both needed new names. The baby never had a name, and Ethel was quite weird without Lucy.
Since we'd just been in England, and we'd taken the Tube a lot while we were there so we knew all the names of the lines, we named Ethel Piccadilly and her kid Bakerloo after our favorites.
After that came the biggest surprise. Another baby. I need to point out that Piccadilly is both this kid's mother and grandmother, to put it mildly. I can also say that this kid is its own nephew/niece, but I think I should stop there.
So that latest development, plus the horrible stink, the mess and the fact that my sister Mira claims to be allergic to them (and I believe her, because I'd rather not have them) my father finally gave in and decided to get rid of them.
He took them to Ein Yael, only to get a call from them later that day, where they told him they actually don't want them. Then he posted on the Efrat e-mail list, and someone said they want them. He gave them Piccadilly and Bakerloo this past Motzai Chag, and then he gave them the baby because it's not done nursing yet. When it's done, we may give it to a cousin of ours who was at our house during the Chag, who said he wants it.
Wow, that was a long story. The point is, we have no more piggies in the house. I wouldn't reccommend them to anyone, but that's just my opinion. We're still celebrating the end of the era.
And my blog is one year old, but I don't think Ein Yael wants it either...
