Custom Plushie Update! Bou, Leo and Ozzy

This is Bou. I hear he's a bitey piggy, so his owner is glad to have a version of him that doesn't have any teeth. She (his owner that is, not the guinea pig) made me a cute baby chocobo plushie in lavender and purple, which you can see in her DeviantArt Gallery.

This is the second custom plushie I've done of a guinea pig named Leo. He's a cute little calico piggy, and since making him I've been thinking of making some calico piggies to put in my shops.

I made this plushie for someone on the GuineaLynx Forums. This is Ozzy, a super fluffy piggy.

I'm always available for plushie commissions. :3

Together at Last! Miso and Archie are Guinea Pals

As you may know, I have five guinea pigs in five separate C&C cages. Why? Because none of them seem to get along well. Naturally we keep the boys and girls separate, for obvious reasons. Miso got along well with his father Ponzu and his brother Shoyu, but since they passed away Kokiri has become overly aggressive (Miso literally jumped for joy when we put up a divider in their cage, poor guy). Mama Mochi and daughter Pocky used to live together, but being a bit bigger Mochi would bully Pocky around and so we separated them as well. Now, with her own space and uninhibited access to food, Pocky has grown bigger and more confident, and she tends to pick on her mom whenever I put them together! The latest addition to our guinea pig family is Archie, a friendly and ultra-hyper little guy, and his good nature seemed agreeable enough that he just might be able to have a cagemate.

We tried putting all the boys together for floor time. Again, Kokiri was just too aggressive, but Archie and Miso seemed to get along well so we tried giving just the two of them floor time. Aside from a bit of rumble-strutting, there weren't any serious conflicts. After a few nights of floor time sessions, the boys really appeared to enjoy playing with each other, and we decided to go ahead with our plans for a combined piggy cage.


First we started with a buddy bath. It was Archie's first bath, and he didn't like being wet at all. Miso, having received several in his life, resigned himself to his watery fate

We're at the start of another heat wave. The warm weather is good for piggy baths, at least when you have damp piggies who keep bopping towels off of them.

Miso and Archie even cuddled together so cutely, and eventually fell asleep side by side as they waiting ever so patiently for their new home to be put together.

We (and by that I mean my boyfriend) took Miso's and Archie's 2x3 C&C cages and combined them into a spacious 2x5. We got them a new Bigloo and put in their chubes, two litter trays, and a cute plaid dog bed. The grids along the top are there so that we can put a fleece canopy over part of the cage to shield them from sun and wind.

They're taking a bit of time to adjust to their new pimpin' pad. You go in the bed, not under it, Miso!

Archie doesn't seem to realize that Miso isn't keen on sharing whatever pigloo he's in, but I'm sure as colder weather sets in they'll be all cuddly. I saw them eating hay from the same hay rack just a few minutes ago. I'm really glad that they're getting along well, and that we can give them a bigger cage as a consequence. Next we'll be trying to get the girls together!

No Roasted Guinea Pigs Here

It's going to be 92° today. And I'm happy about that.

The past few days in the Pacific Northwest have been rather uncomfortable. The temps have risen well past 100°. Being in a third floor apartment with the only windows facing the morning sun and later the scorching afternoon sun, it was like being in a oven. Luckily we have a floor unit air conditioner. Unluckily, it only managed to cool down the living room and reached neither the bedroom nor my studio. The result was my boyfriend and I spending all of our time in the living room during the heat wave. I ventured into my studio momentarily to retrieve something to work on while sitting on the couch, positioned to recieve the direct airflow of the air conditioner.

Mochi stretches out for maximum comfort on a hot, lazy day.

What of the guinea pigs in this hot weather, you ask? OK, well you may not have asked, but it is an issue on days like this. Despite their homeland being in South America, cavies are not well suited for very hot weather. The three boys, Miso, Kokiri and Archie, were already in the living room, but the girls' cages were in my studio. With naught but a ceiling fan, the room had already reached uncomfortable levels on days when the temperature spiked up to 80°. My boyfriend, always the kind and considerate one, set about the task of taking the C&C cages apart and bringing Mochi and Pocky into the living room to rejoin their kin. Some shuffling of furniture was required, and my studio had to be completely rearranged. I spent a couple of days working on the redecorating a few minutes at a time, doing as much organizing as I could manage before the heat became too much and I had to retreat to the cooler clime of the air conditioned room.

"It's much too hot to be in my pigloo today," says the normally reclusive Pocky.

The end result was gaining more floor space, a new table to work on, and a leather recliner in my studio (which no longer fit in the living room with the addition of the C&C cages). All of my guinea pigs were now in a (somewhat) temperature controlled area and could be easily monitored. The thermostats in the bedroom and studio actually read 100° at some points in the preceding days, enough to give any small animal (or human, for that matter) heat exhaustion. Even when the nights cooled to around 70° we opted to sleep out in the living room with the ac running overnight. One of the advantages of a floor unit air conditioner is that you can roll it into another room and set it up rather easily, but we didn't want to risk letting the living room heat up overnight, as warm air so easily becomes trapped in an upstairs apartment. Out came the air mattress, a sleeping bag and some comforters.

It's a brick pig! Kokiri's favorite hangout on a warm day is a cool brick. He doesn't normally have to mess with his eyebrows to cool off, though.

To reiterate, the erstwhile days of this past week were, to say the least, hot. The kind of hot days where you just don't feel like doing much of anything. The kind of days where you can't help falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, yet have trouble getting comfortable in bed at night. The kind of days where a grilled cheese sandwich is more than enough for dinner. The kind of days where you don't want to so much as lean forward from your seat because of the sound and feeling of your skin peeling off the leather couch. Ever since I was a kid I was the kind of person who was always cold, and was so very relieved when I moved from New England to Southern California. Somehow in the past few years, perhaps due to a change of diet and other circumstances, I can't stand excessive warmth. I'm looking forward to next week's milder weather, hoping that it'll bring with it some rain and the creative enthusiam for my ongoing projects that I'd previously been robbed off.