The other day while at my parent’s house my mother said (rather gingerly) “Oh, another one of my ferrets died.” Her ‘furry friends’ as she likes to refer to them are slowly meeting their demise…and she couldn’t be happier. At the height of their reign (and arguably the decline of my mother’s sanity) she had 17 ferrets. Now she has 9. And they all live happily in my childhood bedroom. Yes, just as soon as I moved out to go to college, my mother turned my room into a ferret room. Most parents decide to redecorate, paint the walls, re-carpet, put up nice curtains, whatever…No, not my room. It became a luxury 4 star resort for four-legged ankle biting weasels. No nostalgic memorabilia don the walls, no reminiscing of sleepovers and high school gossip…NO, my old room belongs to ferrets. The fun part in all this is at time she had 17 ferrets she also had 7 dogs, 5 cats, 3 fish tanks and a partridge in a pear tree. All this in a teeny tiny house, I want to say maybe 900 square feet. Oh, and I should mention the dogs were not small foofy dogs, they were samoyeds–a large working breed of dog with thick long white fur used often in dog sledding. SEVEN samoyeds…oh but that’s nothing they had 9 before…