It's really freakin' late...

I have tomorrow off, so I'm enjoying a little late night alone time. I say alone, when actually the night shift has clocked in at our house. We have two sets of pets: the solar powered kind and the kind where we have to tell our daytime visitors that it's not an empty cage, just drop by around 1 am or 6am before they call it a day... night... whatever.

So, at this late hour, going strong and weighing in at 8 oz. or so of fluff is our chinchilla Cooper (named for the Mini Cooper his spirit embodies). His big beady lil black eyes can make out every detail in the near dark. Not total dark because above him, in the corner, weighing in at, gosh, 2 oz is our leopard gecko Chrysopholax (named for a Tolkein dragon), and he has a black light heat source which casts off an eerie purple haze that late night joggers may interpret as a nightly seance or smoke out... who knows, we're artists and with that comes certain preconceived notions. And unless our leopard gecko is holding out on us, he's probably just crawling around his plastic bonsai tree looking for crickets: moving with a zen like calm, his white body glowing under the light making him look ethereal, his S-curving walk attaining a grace I'll never posses. Upon seeing me, he raises his head, takes a full two seconds to languidly blink his marbelized golden eyes at me and contemplate how my species became the dominant one when I clean up his poop corner. Who is the Master? Who is the Grasshopper? I bow and walk out of the room backwards...

Our Degu, a small cousin to the chinny, does have a name (Bilbo because he's so hobbit like), but we can't resist calling him 'the Degu.' He's working the swing shift, meaning he's a dusk and dawn critter that hopefully in the wild gets by on that confusing time when the day predators get to chatting with the night predators before they clock in, and meanwhile the degus get their little business done. So, since I'm up, I get an occasional squeak from him. He's not hungry, that's a different squeak. He's not bored really, either, it's his way of saying "Hey! Whazzup?!" (One day I'll see him point his little paw at me, then tap his chest twice... and no one will believe me).

We have also a big Tokay gecko who will kill at any given chance, so it's hard to decide what shift he's on. And since his kind don't have eyelids, who's to say if he's asleep or just luring you into a false sense of security?

Well, those are pretty much my nighttime thoughts. No 2 am feedings, just some psychedelic lights, jumping furballs, tai chi lizards and an occasional "Whazzup!"