Mio has been aware of our pet chinchillas for a few months now, and she often stares over at them and watches them eat and drink in their cage. She loves when I hold her up to their cage and let her poke her fingers in to touch their fur. Lately, I will give her a treat to feed to them and she’ll hold it out to the chinchillas to grab. (One out of five times, she’ll reach to put it into her own mouth, so I have to be hypervigilant about watching her and ensuring that doesn’t happen.) We captured it on video last night — the smile that spreads across her face every time Diesel or Piper accept a treat from her hand is priceless…!
These guys haven’t made an appearance on the blog for a while, because I’m always writing about Mio, but we still love them! I’ll always remember that our chinchillas (especially Diesel) were our first “babies” before Mio came along.
This past month has been intense with all the excitement of the World Cup — I know it’s been keeping me glued to ESPN and on the edge of my seat for many a game — but it all came to an end today with the World Cup Final, as Spain emerged as the victors over the Netherlands to become the World Cup 2010 Champions!
Congratulations to Spain! Holland did really well this World Cup too, but this time it just wasn’t in the cards…. Â (Although they did win for getting the most yellow cards in any game I’ve ever seen.) Congratulations to Paul the Octopus as well, the cephalopod who has gotten 8 out of 8 of his predictions this tournament right! He has become an international sensation of sorts. 🙂
Seeing this little octopus making “Breaking News” on CNN and causing such a stir this World Cup got me wondering if either of our very own pet chinchillas had any psychic abilities of his own. Here we are putting Diesel to the test this morning, shortly before the game:
Unfortunately, the only thing Diesel ended up proving was that he is not cut out to be a psychic chinchilla. 🙁 His quest for fame will have to be rewarded by some other means….
We have a lovely cherry blossom tree in front of our new place, along with some other pretty little flowers that have come into bloom this spring. Over the weekend, we decided to have a little fun photoshoot with Diesel. Here are my favorites!
Quite the photogenic one, isn’t he? Excuse my oya baka moment, but I had to share… 😉
Due to the recent move, we had a lot of cardboard boxes lying around, so Dan decided on a project for himself — to create a play castle for our chinchillas Diesel and Piper. I was at first skeptical about the idea, but it turned out surprisingly sturdy with three floors accompanied by internal staircases leading up to each. The chinchillas seem to be having a lot of fun with it, too! We found a way to coax them to them to the top by hanging one of their favorite treats on the pinnacle.
Dan and I recently got a new chinchilla buddy for Diesel. We actually got him a few weeks ago, on Superbowl Sunday, from the chinchilla rescue center down in the South Bay. Since Indy died in early June of last year, it’s taken me a while to get over the loss since he was one of my first pets (along with Diesel), and it was my first time losing a pet. Chinchillas are very social animals, so we’d been considering getting another chinchilla to keep Diesel company for a while now, but kept putting it off since it’s significantly more work to take care of chinchillas (twice as much feed, twice as much shedding, twice as much poo, you get the idea) and thins were busy at the end of the year with holidays and traveling.
Diesel was looking particularly bored lately though, so we decided to go for it and pay the chinchilla rescue center a visit. The ladies that take in these chinchillas are amazing women and they are really dedicated to taking in and caring for orphaned chinchillas and finding new “forever homes” for them. Both Diesel and Indy had come from the chinchilla rescue. If you live in the Bay Area and are considering a chinchilla as a pet, please consider going to a rescue center instead of buying chinchillas at pet stores. There are several chinchillas whose owners were unable to care for them anymore, or were found abandoned — sometimes in really awful circumstances — and it’s important that they find a permanent home with loving owners. To learn more or to see available chinchillas for adoption, please visit ChinchillaRescue.org.
Piper (at left) and Diesel in their cage together.
After having Diesel “meet” and run around with some of the other chinchillas at the rescue center, there was one in particular that seemed to be pretty compatible with him. Only a year old, he was pretty big — almost as large as Diesel! Usually the chinchillas at the rescue centers have names that were given to them by their previous owners (Diesel was Booshie when we adopted him, and Indy had been Petey), but this new chinchilla had not been given a name, so the rescue center had labeled his cage “No-Name.” So we decided to adopt “No-Name” and bring him home with us. We threw around some names for him (among them were Oreo, Pepper, Bullet) for about a week or so, but the name that seemed to stick was Piper. There’s no really story or reasoning behind the name — Dan just thought it was a cute name for the new guy, and it just sort of rolled off our tongues without even thinking after a while.
Chinchillas are supposed to be kept in separate cages for the first couple weeks, and you let them spend more and more time together as they gradually get used to one another. It’s already been well over two weeks since we brought Piper into our home, and he and Diesel have been getting along great! There were some minor squabbles here and there as they’ve tried to show their dominance to each other (very common among chinchillas), but they are now happily living together in the same cage and seem like best friends! It’s especially adorable when they groom each other and give each other scratches. It seems like Piper is even more compatible with Diesel than Indy was. (Although of course, we still miss Indy a lot.) We actually haven’t taken too many photos yet since Piper rarely sits still, but here are a couple photos that we took last week.
A wide-eyed Piper and a grumpy-looking Diesel.
That’s all for now, but you can be sure to see more photos and videos posted of these two cuties in the months to come! 🙂
