Project 365+1 Days 58 - 64

Here's another week's worth of photos. It hasn't been a particularly eventful week and I had a funny feeling that when I came to sort out all of my photos, there wouldn't be a huge amount to work with (I've been doing the classic thing where I take random photos of things like my step counter or odd bits of food because I didn't think there would be anything else to use). But I've been pleasantly surprised with what I've done this week.

Day 58: Rats On TV

I was surprised to find this picture of Carol exploring the TV on my camera. I'd completely forgotten that I'd taken it. All week I've been trying to get some good photos of the girls, but the problem with Carol is that she rarely sits still long enough to focus. I have lots of blurry photos, or photos with a bit of nose or bum or tail, or of the top of the cage where moments before a rat had been.

Normally at home the girls live in a little alcove, just between the living room and bedroom, so when we let them out on top of the cage there's not really anything interesting to investigate. While we've been here they've been sandwiched between a dresser and a TV which is proving to be a great source of interest (once we convinced them to stop trying to eat them through the bars of the cage!), if we let them, they'd probably quite happily go exploring on the TV, but I was mean and stopped Carol before she could go too far.

One thing I do love about this picture is that you can see that Carol's clearly part flying squirrel (which perhaps explains why she is so confident hanging upside-down from the top of the cage). She's a bit of a slippery rat because you can be holding her when she suddenly decides to change direction; she's got so much extra skin that it seems like you're just left holding fur while Carol's trying to squirm off somewhere more interesting!

Day 59: Night Watch

This week has also been a good week for reading. I was getting low on reading material, so gave Mr. Click strict instructions on what to bring back from my bookshelf. At some point I'll have to take a photo of how my books are organised, it's kind of obsessive. I've got various sets sorted out and I'm working my way through them all gradually (in order, of course) but after reading a book from one set, I read another book from another set.

The Discworld books are right at the top of the bookcase, followed by the Stranger Than Fiction set I've been working through, then crime books (I'm reading the Kathy Reichs ones at the moment), then there's my Tolkien books (though I finished the last of those last week, so that will be rearranged soon). When I get to the bottom of the bookcase, I go back up to the top and start over with the next Discworld novel.

Day 60: What To Do On A Leap Day

As I posted earlier in the week we went to see War Horse on the 29th. I knew that I wanted to take a photo of something with the date on it (if we'd been at home I would've used the Winnie the Pooh calendar that we keep on the windowsill and usually remember to turn every day, sometimes we both do it and we end up a day or two ahead of ourselves!) but I didn't have much luck finding anything. At bedtime I whipped out my diary and grabbed a quick photo of the date. I wonder what we'll be up to next time February 29th rolls around...

Day 61: Getting Mathematical

When I reluctantly finished reading Night Watch (I'll write up a review for that later on, I'm almost caught up level with the books I've been reading and the books I've been reviewing), I started on Fermat's Last Theorum. I'll say more about it in the review when I write it, so for now, just enjoy this picture of this book posing atop my book journal. ;-) I have to admit, a large reason for taking this photo (and the one of Night Watch) was so I wouldn't have to go looking for a picture of the cover which is the same as my copy when I come to actually write up the review.

Day 62: Continental Breakfast

At the weekend, we sometimes spoil ourselves with something fancy for breakfast (my personal favourite being pain au chocolat). Mr. Click proudly presented me with a bag of croissants after work on Friday. They sat in the corner of the room tormenting me all night, and they barely lasted five minutes on Saturday morning! They tasted lovely though. As I said above, I was kind of scraping around for things to take photos of. It turns out, it's really hard to take a photo of croissants in a bag like this and make them look appetising. Looking at them now is kind of making me hungry, so moving on...

Day 63: All Worn Out

I'm planning a separate blog post about my girls because I've taken about half a million photos of them this week (and some of them have turned out quite well and so deserve to be shared). As we were planning on going home later this afternoon, we wanted to get them cleaned out but didn't want to use rat litter (because it costs a fortune and we didn't want to be putting it in, only to throw it out the next day). So we used shredded paper instead.

Now I've used shredded paper as something for ratties to play in before, and as bedding, but these girls had never experienced it before. And they went MAD for it. The picture above shows what part of the cage looked like about five hours after we put them back in. They'd carried vast quantities of paper up to the shelf and litter tray, then decided not to sleep in the comfy, clean hammock that we'd put in for them because the hard plastic litter tray was much more comfortable to sleep in. I suppose with all that paper (and Carol) to lie on, it wasn't too bad.

Day 64: Ivy

And today I was trying to take a photo of the further destruction that has been wreaked on the cage. I'll post the actual photos another time, but suffice to say I was woken at 7:30 this morning by Holly jumping down off the shelf, grabbing a mouthful of paper, jumping back up, depositing it on the shelf (and lather, rinse, repeat).

When I oped the cage to get the photo of the heap of paper on the shelf, Carol went crazy, so I sat back and took photos of her through the bars. Bell and Holly were curled up alseep ignoring me but Ivy was a little bit curious. I don't normally get any decent photos of Ivy. She's petrified of the sound of my DSLR and I don't really like using the flash around the rats, so normally photos of her end up with her looking terrified. But she didn't seem too bothered by me sitting outside the cage, snapping photos of Carol, so I focused on her for a couple of shots. I was really pleased that this came out so well, seeing as I was taking photos through the bars.

That's how Ivy normally looks. She has a cheeky little look on her face which is just pure Ivy. She likes sitting in the tunnels and can sometimes be a bit reluctant to come out of the cage (but while we've been here she's been desperate to come out almost every time we open the door). She's also a proper shoulder rat, it's the first thing she heads for when she comes out. And now I have a nice photo of each of my girls.

And now that we're into March, I've also made a collage of all of the photos I took in February. I'm quite pleased with the fact that I've managed to go so many days without missing any. According to the Project 365 site, I'm 17% of the way through my project. I think that the last time when I tried doing this I failed sometime in March, so here's hoping that once I've broken the 20% barrier I'll be able to keep going until the end of the year!

February 2012 in pictures