An Update & A Fresh Start

First, the update:

It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. There are reasons for that & although I had originally intended to chronicle as much of  life with Monty & his chums as I could, some things are just too painful to write about at the time.

2009 was a horrible year for the inhabitants of Monty’s Manor. There were several emergencies, huge vet bills, sleepless nights treating poorly chins, difficult decisions, and a some heartbreaking losses. One thing which left me devastated was the loss of His Furriness, The Lord Montague back in May.

At that point, I must say, my heart went out of chinchilla keeping &, to be perfectly honest, it is still recovering – slowly. Monty was my first chinchilla. He was the reason & his departure marked the end of an era. I genuinely miss his massive, cute, larger-than-life presence & the chin room is just not the same without him. He taught me so much about chinchillas.

Now I don’t want to be Danny Depressing so I’m not going to wallow in the mire of last year but I am going to go back and add in some posts when I can (including a memorial to Lord Montague) – to fill in some of the gaps now that things are not quite so raw.  Although I guess one could call it cheating (back-dated blogging) I think that’s preferable to doing a massive long catch up post now – even I probably wouldn’t want to read it!

So please bear with me……… I’ll add in some links when I’ve posted.

A Fresh Start -

So life in Monty’s Manor has changed quite a bit.  Talie is no longer living in my lounge & I now have 2 chins living in my bedroom: Ebby and Gzifa.

Ebby is currently watching me from her cage on my right & Gzifa (silent “g”) is burrowed under my duvet. Every now and again she appears to check I’m still here, sits on my shoulder for a minute or two, & then disappears again. The lump in the duvet is heading towards me as I type this. She will be out again soon – I will check her over for signs of being a tad warm (red ears & hot feet) &  if she is a little warm then it’s back in the cage for her. She’s pretty good though and usually comes out of under the duvet if she is getting warm. Gzifa’s a bit of a nutter!

I’ll try and update on some of the other chin room characters during the next few posts. For now it’s nice to be back.