All the animals in the zoo

I used my trusty cell phone to take some not-very-good quality pictures of my ani-pals tonight.

Presenting Carmen, who is a cat, obviously, a little more than one year old. Carmen is one of those cats that actually grew more attractive as she got older. She was a cute kitten of course — all kittens are cute — but she grew into a beautiful adult cat.

And my rats, Gypsy and Harriet. Unfortunately they wouldn’t cooperate with the camera and only Gypsy deigned to show us her face. You can see their home in the background. They like to sit in the blue triangular hammocky thing. Both of them will squeeze themselves in there at once.

And this, alas, is Gypsy’s mammary tumor. It’s enormous, but it does not seem to be bothering her yet. Unless she’s climbing the side of the cage, you can’t see it at all except for the funny way she walks. Michael and I are monitoring her closely and when she begins to suffer we will send her to the big Rat Burrow in the Sky. But why hurry? She seems happy enough at present.