quiregrrl | Love is ...

... double-bagging a dead rodent and putting it in your freezer for safe-keeping.

My awesome neighbour-flatmate (aka best girl) has an awesome ratter kitty, Fatpants. Fatpants has taken to regularly gifting Best Girl with a dead rat on the back yard path every week or so, and after the last one I said "would it be weird if I asked you to stick the next one in the freezer until I can collect it so I can have the skull?" and best girl gave me her best "you are a fucking nutjob weirdo and I can't believe we're friends" look, (which I am VERY familiar with), and said "Ew".

This morning I went over to make Sunday brunch of wholemeal banana pancakes with cinnamon-honey ricotta (om nom nom) and was amazed and delighted when best girl said "Oh, by the way, there's a dead rat in the freezer for you and you better take it with you when you leave today". Sure enough, sealed inside two sturdy ziplock baggies, there was a very dead, rather frozen, rat, which I dutifully and gratefully brought home with me and is now continuing it's death in my freezer.

I just spent the last half hour or so reading articles and blogs on how best to skeletonise a corpse. As you do. Pretty much all of the options are very pungent and/or require being able to leave/bury the corpse somewhere safe from large scavengers for up to a year. None of them are particularly good for someone living in a unit. It would be easier if I just try to do the skull, but I want the rest of the bones as well, and so my best option I think will be to try skinning and dissecting/defleshing the body as much as possible manually, and then boiling the fresh bones and remaining (hopefully minimal) flesh in a mild bleach solution. And then throwing away the saucepan.

I have the best best-girl ever...