It's been six weeks since Egon's passing and we realized we have so many wonderful memories of him, even as we miss him terribly.
He had the most *expressive* jowls, making his facial features nuanced, vivid, animated and so Totally Egon. Happy, curious, frustrated, inquisitive, baffled, confused, excited, angry, determined, playful - Egon could convey them all with just his facial expression and posture - assisted by the longest whiskers I have ever seen on a ferret.
Egon had the softest, most velvety muzzle fur. Every once in a while, he'd let me touch it for more than a few seconds. That's when I understood why Harley liked to snuggle her face up to Egon's when the two of them slept - that must have been the softest, warmest, best spot ever to sleep for her. That and Egon's ferret breath, too!
It's said that "Every weasel needs a hobby". One of Egon's hobbies was bubble wrap. Or, more specifically, the inside of padded envelopes that use bubble wrap as cushioning. He loved padded FedEx envelopes. He'd amuse us to no end as he investigated the envelope inside and out, then took up a strategic position inside, sharpened his claws and then proceeded to *rip*rip*rip*rip*rip*rip* until every single bubble inside the envelope was popped. Then he'd flop on his back and to the same to the other side of the envelope. We thought it was the most amazing thing - one of these ferret fixations, where Egon couldn't and wouldn't stop until the job was done and every single bubble in the envelope had been reduced to a shredded version of its former self.
This was actually one of those ferret fixations where the humans around would get tired of watching him before he got tired of popping bubble wrap.
While he was interested in it, Egon never showed the same kind of behavioral determination with just sheets of bubble wrap than he did with doing it from inside a padded FedEx envelope. Maybe he enjoyed the "burrow-like" feeling inside the envelope, maybe he liked it because it was warm in there, or perhaps he enjoyed the way how being inside the envelope must have amplified the ripping sounds for him.
Since he never ate any of the plastic - and we watched closely for that since one of Egon's other hobbies was eating cloth when he was very young - we figured it couldn't hurt to let him have a FedEx envelope all his own that he could drag into one of his hidey holes under the futon.
Over the next few days we kept hearing the telltale *rip*rip*rip*rip*rip*rip* sounds emanating from underneath the futon quite frequently. Our "awww - isn't that cute" reaction lasted for about as long as it took us to decide to clean up under the futon, where we found one large padded FedEx envelope with its inside bubble wrap literally ripped into thousands, possibly tens of thousands of teeny tiny pieces. Obviously, Egon's goal had never just been popping all of the bubbles in the padding, but the Utter and Complete Destruction of the envelope itself. Much to FedEx's credit, while Egon efficiently destroyed the bubble wrap, the envelope itself remained completely unscathed, with the exception of a few teeth marks that left puncture marks but did in no way threaten the integrity of the envelope.
The clean-up effort involved in retrieving a gazillion tiny plastic pieces from underneath the futon was enough work for the human members of the household that from then on out Egon's hobby of FedEx Envelope Hellionating became a strictly supervised activity. It was a hobby he enjoyed way into his old age, even though we couldn't allow him to exert himself too much during the last few months of his life, as his blood sugar situation was so unstable due to his suffering from insulinoma.
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