Yesterday morning I grabbed a shovel, trudged out to my backyard, and dug a hole a couple of feet deep, put a small shoebox containing the remains of my rat Turing in the hole and then sadly covered that box with dirt.

Losing my rat wasn't as painful as losing my dogs was, but it was still a very sad process. Turing started turning his nose up at food on Tuesday morning. He went to the vet Tuesday afternoon, and the vet said "there's nothing I can do." We took him home and tried to make him comfortable until he passed away in his sleep early Wednesday evening.

Turing was a very odd little beast. When he and Wallace came home with us, Turing was the dominant of the two. He ate first, he got the pick of the sleeping spots, etc. However, as they grew, Wallace figured out he was bigger than Turing and started to take advantage of that. Fairly soon he was the boss of the rat house. Wallace was social, Turing wasn't, when let out to play Wallace would actually play and clamber on and groom his people, Turing would find the darkest place he could find, drag a few treasures there and hang out all by himself.

It's amazing how creatures can have so much personality that's all their own.

I'll miss the little beast.

Wallace and Turing have lived with us for 13 days now. They've been shy little creatures, startled by everything, preferring their cage to the outside world.

Well, three nights ago, they started exploring the world outside their cage, slowly, but in ever-increasing circles, darting back in immediately when something worried them.

Two nights ago they started laying claim to things they found and hauling them back to their cage and hiding them in their quonset hut. They found a ball and a little rolling cylinder we'd bought for them to play with, and some strips of cloth we had out for additional bedding, and then...they found Lego! We laughed a lot and took it away, but it was a lot of fun to see them deciding what was theirs.

Last night, they explored again, but this time Wallace decide he actually wanted to play. We played tug-of-war, with a strip of fabric, and he played silly little chase games trying to tempt me to follow him into his cage. Not only that, both of them decided they liked me. They climbed into my hands, my lap, up on my shoulders and chased eachother around my lap.

We'd been getting worried that we'd found the two most unsociable rats in the world, but I think they were just learning to get comfortable in their new environment.

As I've been learning about my rats, I've come across a couple of interesting sites. The first The Dapper Rat because I was searching for rat habitats and their Grotto is quite the amazing rat habitat. The second site, Curiousity Rats was simply me stumbling around on the web looking for rat information. There's a lot to be found there.

My middle son William decided he needed a gerbil for Christmas. Being firm believers in getting people the gifts they ask for Santa brought him two lovely little gerbils which he named Typhoon and Tsunami. My eldest son Travis saw and fell in love with a guinea pig, and decided he had to have one. A couple of my friends, when they heard about the gerbils and the guinea pig said "Rats! You need rats!"

On Saturday we went to the store to look at guinea pigs for Travis. Dad made the mistake of asking if he could hold one of the two male rats. Since rats need a friend, both of the rats came home with us that day. Travis is still waiting to find the guinea pig he wants.

I named the rats after two of my heroes, William Wallace (if you've seen the movie Braveheart you know who he is), and Alan Turing (if you don't know who he is you made read about him here.

Wallace and Turing are hooded rats with black hoods and white bodies. So far they are proving to be loads of fun. They're still not used to their new environment, and since they're still young they're a bit timid, but they have proven to be friendly and fun little beasts.