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.
Happy Halloween! Halloween is always one of my favorite days of the year — I love seeing how creative people get with their costumes and decorations, and it’s a fun occasion to dress up! Dan and I didn’t do anything last year because I was really sick on Halloween weekend, and I was really bummed… 🙁
This year, we celebrated a day early, going to a friend’s Halloween party. Dan and I both worked on our costumes for a couple hours on Saturday afternoon before going to the party. Can you guess what we were supposed to be?
We may just look like a generic jock and cheerleader, but those who are sharp may have guessed that we were supposed to be characters from Glee! Since the show started airing, we’ve actually had several people tell us that Dan looks a lot like Finn Hudson, the star quarterback of the school and one of the central characters in the show. We’ve even had a random passerby come up to us at a restaurant to point out that they thought there was a striking resemblance. A lot of people say there’s a resemblance, some don’t see it… I can see that they have similarities in stature, the pale complexion, the pigeon chest, the general face shape, and hairstyle, but I think most of the likeness is in their facial expressions, like the face they have when they’re flustered or confused, or when they raise an eyebrow in a questioning look.
Anyway, we had enough people bring the likeness to our attention that we decided to run with it as an idea for Dan’s Halloween costume this year.
The costume was pretty easy — we took a plain red Nike jersey and stuck a huge number 5 on the front and back for Finn’s football outfit…
We stenciled and cut out white letters to spell out “HUDSON” for the back:
I have no such resemblance to any of the characters in Glee, but we decided to have some fun playing off of the pregnancy factor that I shared with Quinn Fabray, Cheerios head cheerleader and Finn’s former flame who was pregnant during most of the first season.
For the Cheerios uniform, I just ordered a simple red and white cheerleader uniform, and spent the afternoon meticulously stenciling out the letters WMHS (for William McKinley High School) onto red cloth and outlining them in white and black cloths, and gluing it onto the chest of the uniform.
Costumes complete, we headed over to our friend Joletta’s, who was hosting a Halloween party at her house.
There was lots of delicious food and we played a few fun Halloween-themed games! Afterwards, those of us who brought pumpkins gathered around to do some pumpkin-carving.
The completed pumpkins! They all came out so well!!! Can you guess which one is mine…?
I made the Totoro jack-o-lantern! 🙂 I was actually quite pleased with the result:
Dan went with his signature scary style with the carving, and created this two-faced jack-o-lantern. He carved it really fast, too; we were impressed! (He actually finished this complicated design before I completed my simple little Totoro… haha*)
Everyone at the Halloween party was dressed in such fun costumes! I really enjoyed seeing what everyone came as. :)Â Huge thanks to Joletta and Mapolo for hosting and organizing such a fun party!
Lovely Ann Helen made an adorable chef!
Lilly was the prettiest elf, and David came as a Turk! haha*
With French maid Joletta and bumblebee Christella.
We brought our pumpkins home, and I let Piper play with it since this is his first Halloween with us. Diesel was uninterested, apparently fed up from my past Halloween antics. Piper ended up biting off part of Totoro’s ear, though, so we had to repair it. 🙁
All fixed!
Today, we spent the day doing some major cleaning around the house and just prepared some candy for potential trick-or-treaters that might come by this evening. We hope everyone had a safe and fun-filled Halloween!!!
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! 🙂
