Procrastinet

Is Kashi a guinea pig? Um, are you still allowed to have guinea pigs in your family? I seem to remember one horrible summer in the early 80s...

Are you talking about the guinea pig baby boom that we experienced, on the hare-brained idea that I would be able to sell the guinea pig babies for fun and profit? Yeah. Not so much.

We did end up with six pet guinea pigs for me to egregiously neglect for the next several years. I actually still have guilt-ridden anxiety dreams about those guinea pigs. Kashi (who, yes, is a guinea pig) doesn't exactly live in the constant lap of luxury, but she gets way more attention than those mid-80s specimens got... Sigh.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. And I'm recalling in particular an incident wherein you threw a blanket over a cage with your pet guinea pig in it, then went away on vacation for a couple of weeks. (Can't quite remember if the guinea pig managed to escape and find some food in the basement, of whether you found his parched bones in the forgotten dungeon, Monte Cristo-style, when you returned....)

SLANDER! LIES!

Actually, I don't recall the vacation incident - though I can't believe Procrastimom would have allowed such a thing, even if I were to have decided to so grossly derelict my pet-owning duty. I know I took them along on several trips, including to St. Louis for Xmas.

So no, no withered husks of starved guinea pigs. Just their long, shameful twilight in the basement in Waterford... *shudder* I bear a steep karmic burden there.

Yeah, upon reflection I wonder if this isn't a false repressed memory, or at least a horribly distorted one. (Or at least that's what my lawyer is advising me to say.) Maybe it's based on a story you told me after you moved away and became (apparently) a full-time guinea swineherd. Having said that, I do recall that the basement of your house, where your room was located, was Your Domain and more or less out of the jurisdiction of the Procrastimom. I specifically remember (and I know I'm not making this one up) a can of something--spagetti-Os?--that was allowed to sit on a shelf, open and unrefrigerated, for an ungodly length of time, until it changed color. (I can't remember if it was eventually cleaned up or if it simply evolved legs and skulked away.)

Anyway, that's why I was surprised to see your offspring with a guinea pig. Maybe he'll pick up a taste for cuy?

So far he has looked at Kashi with only affectionate, and not culinary, eyes.

It was in fact Spaghetti-Os that sat on one of the sheves in my room (the "outer" room where all my crap was, rather than the "inner" room where my bed and desk were - ah, the suburbs! They shriveled into something hard, and alien, and - if I recall correctly - blue, before they were eventually thrown away with the spoon still sticking out of the can.

SHUDDER.