'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Mama Bonbon said that Christmas would be a surprise and.....
.....we agree with her. We have a pretty stocking full of our favourite veggies.
"Ambrose! That is a whole pepper you have there! Slave always cuts them into pieces for us. Let me have some." says Oscar.
" Shall we share it with some other piggies?" says Ambrose. " We do eat a lot but I think that even big piggies like us cannot eat all of this unless we have some hay and a nap first."
Oscar and Ambrose shared out their veggies with the other Piggyfriends and here are Picchu and Fionn having some pepper.
"Christmas is all about giving, " says Picchu, who has seen many Christmases here.
We hope that all of our readers had a Merry Pigmas and the slaves too.
"Is this something to do with Christmas? I do not understand humans."
"Christmas is coming and the pigs are getting fat...tra la."
Ambrose: Who are you calling fat?
Oscar: That wasn't me! Slave is singing to the girls next door. She is cleaning out their pen.
Ambrose: I like a nice fat sow, me.
Oscar: They are certainly very plumptious. Is that a word?
Orla: Me too!
Ambrose: Who is Christmas and why is he coming?
Oscar: I have no idea. Let us ask Mama Bonbon. She is old and wise and is sure to know.
Mama Bonbon: Christmas boys? Of course. You were only tiny piglets last Christmas and you did not live here then. I don't know where you were but you may not remember Christmas. It is a wonderful holiday and you will find out all about it in three days time! Most of all, you have to be good piggies and then you will see what happens.
Oscar and Ambrose:This sounds exciting! We can do "good". No nibbling on Slave's shirt when she cleans our pen.
Hello readers,
It is a long time since we published a story in our A-Z so it is about we picked up where we left off.
"Where was that then?" asks Bella Piggyfriend through a mouthful of grass.
"I think we had reached M," replies Mama Bonbon. " Oh that is M for me!"
"M for me too," says Miss Marple ( right of our photo).
"I can think of a good word for N," announces Mama Bonbon ( left of our photo ). "We should start with N for Nutrition. We have talked a lot about different veggies since we started this marathon alphabet and we probably did G for Grass but this is the finest food for piggies and we cannot rate it highly enough." (munch munch munch )
"Aunty Pat has an idea for N as well," says Mama Bonbon so we will see that one soon.
First of all we must apologise to our dear readers for the long delay in getting back to posting. Like our friends, the Surrey Squeakers, we depend on our Slave to help us write the blog and both of our Slaves have been very busy but now we are back to wish everyone a Happy Hallowe'en.
Ambrose: "What is that fat round orange thing next to you Oscar?"
Oscar: " Why, that is you Ambrose!"
Ambrose: " Very funny! No. The other side."
Oscar: " I don't know but there is another one beside you. You can't see it because the sun is in your eyes and don't look now but there is a big spider above your head."
Oscar and Ambrose: " We do not understand what this is all about but Slave says that we must both say 'Happy Hallowe'en!' to our readers."
So we are. " Happy Hallowe'en!"
Oscar: "What was that all about Ambrose?"
Ambrose: " I am sure that I don't know. Let's go and ask Mr. Google. He will know."
We have some photos from Piggyfriends#2 or, as Auntie Pat calls it, Piggyfriends West.
They have a lovely vegetable garden and here is a picture of their first carrot crop, all ready for the piggies ( and the human Slaves too.)
Like us, they all love the carrot tops even more than the carrots themselves. Here is new girl, Danu, tucking in.
Mama Rin and her daughter, Maki, are enjoying their carrots.
And here are Zelda and Ripley speeding towards their share. Trinity always snatches her food and takes it into her pigloo so we have no photo of her. She even takes her food bowl into her pigloo. Funny pig.
They are lucky in that they do not have rabbits in their garden stealing their carrots.
The Connecticut branch of Piggyfriends, that we call Piggyfriends #2. has a new addition! This little lady was handed in at the animal shelter where our one time Junior Slave works.
Here she is at home. She was rather nervous at first but has now blossomed. She needed a new name and, after a lot of consideration, her new owners decided on Danu. This little piggy had, at some time, had a litter, whereabouts unknown, and Danu is the Mother Goddess in Celtic mythology rather like Gaia in other mythologies.
Here she is again. As you can see, she is a very fluffy Abby and will be well loved in her new home with other sows to keep her company and piles of fresh veggies and grass from their garden.
So please welcome Danu. We will be able to watch her and her friends on Skype when we have family get togethers.
Hello everyone --- Bert and Ernie here! We are still the new pigs on the block here at Prairie Pigs, but we are trying hard to become indispensable members of the team by being extra helpful to Slave, especially at cage cleaning time.
Here we are, helping to sweep out our cage. Well, it's more of a quality control function really --- we are carefully inspecting the hay that Slave has just swept up. Can you believe it? In this dust pan alone, we found seven strands of hay that we had not even tasted yet. What a waste it would have been to throw those into the compost! We hope this serves to demonstrate the importance of letting your guinea pigs help with cage cleaning decisions.
Well, that's enough work for one day! Here we are engaging in our favourite activity --- girl watching! (Since it's still several hours until afternoon grass snack time, which is when Meabh the Brave gets let out for her floor time, there are no actual girls to watch yet. We are really just sitting on top of our wooden houses and staring intensely at the back door of Meabh's cage, rather than girl watching precisely. But we are absolutely ready to leap into action at any moment that a girl pig might suddenly come into view!)
We hope that everyone out there is safe, healthy and enjoying the summer, and that piggies everywhere are looking for ways to help out!
After a really cold Spring, when our hawthorn trees did not blossom, the weather suddenly turned really hot and "hey presto", as if by magic, all the trees turned white with mayflowers.
So, although it is ridiculously late, here is Caoimhe being our May Queen.
Slave went to pick some blossom and asked her son, who was visiting for the holiday weekend, to choose a lady pig who would sit still and he selected Caoimhe.
"What is this stuff," asks Caoimhe. " Is it edible?"
Actually the leaves can be eaten. Slave says that when she was little, the children used to eat the leaves and called it the bread and cheese tree.We are not sure that it would be nice for piggies as we eat neither bread nor cheese and anyway the tree has nasty thorns so we will not recommend it as a food item.
Hello readers!
We have been sent a photo of one of the Piggyfriends#2 herd, who live in CT.
The girls all had a spa day, with shampoos, pedicures and haircuts and here is Maki, relaxing in her towels and enjoying a leaf.
Hello readers. Picchu Piggyfriend here.
We were going to make a May Day post. Our girls were competing for the right to be May Queen and have a crown of mayflowers. We have a hedge of hawthorn ( may ) along the side of our garden.
I think that Bella would have won by virtue of her mere weight although Caoimhe is growing to be a big girl too.
Unfortunately, our spring has been unseasonably cold this year and there was not a single blossom to be picked so the girls will have to wait until next year. We cannot have a May Queen without any May.
There has been a lot of excitement among the Prairie Pigs in the last few days: two new little boars have appeared very suddenly in the next room! We only found out about it after Meabh the Brave (who also lives in that room) came for her usual evening visit and told us the whole story.
Apparently our Slave's vet clinic phoned her a few days ago to tell her about two guinea pigs who urgently needed a new home. All of the other Prairie Pigs have come from the local humane society shelter, but this sounded like a situation where help was needed right away, so she asked the clinic to give her phone number to the piggies' owner and, before we knew a thing about it, she was off to collect them and quite a stack of paraphernalia that came with them.
These are our new recruits --- Bert and Ernie. They are two handsome Abyssinian boars, and to tell the truth, we are a little jealous that they get to live in the same room with Meabh the Brave and have chats with her in the middle of the night after Slave is asleep.
Pooh Piglets Rescue had some baby boars needing homes but when our Slave called Pauline, who runs the rescue, they had already been rehomed but she had these two slightly older teddy brothers needing a home.
They had been fostered by one of her helpers and she took this photo of them. Slave immediately said that she would love them and Pauline replied that she needed to get there as soon as possible or they would be gone. Pauline does not reserve piggies so early the next morning, Slave set out for Pooh Piglets and they were still there.
A very socially distanced handover with Slave standing at the piggy shed door and Pauline holding them out at arm's length took place and they were on their way home to Piggyfriends.
They are five months old and the foster lady called them Kenneth and Keith. Slave does not like these names plus she knows someone called Keith and it would seem a bit odd to name a piggy after him. A long debate ensued between us and her and she finally came up with Oscar for one of them, having run out of the usual Irish names that newcomers are likely to be given.
They are almost identical but you can see that the one of the left has a tiny patch of white hair above his nose and between his eyes amongst the orange. Brush it the wrong way and it disappears! He is Oscar.
Slave likes alliterative names for pairs of piggies but, having had piggies for more years than we can count, she has run out of names beginning with O. She was planting some achimenes, which are pretty houseplants, of which she has even more than she has piggies, and one of them has the varietal name of Ambrose Verschaffeltii ( we had to look up how to spell that ) named after the man who first grew it and she thought that Ambrose was a nice piggy name ( without that long name after it ).
So Oscar's brother is now called Ambrose. We suspect that they will get mixed up and she will call them the orange boys instead but we all have cards on our pens with our names.
Here they are again. As you can see, the both love carrots. Slave says that is why they are so orange. They really do have red eyes. That is not Slave being useless with the camera.
So please welcome Oscar and Ambrose, our newest friends. They are very loud when it is mealtime but Fionn is our loudest piggy by far.
