Jodi, Jodi's mom and I took Poopy on a trip this morning to the pet market to buy chinchilla feed. The owners of both chinchilla stores said we'd done a good job raising him (we knew that) and they had fun petting him. The lady who runs the whole chinchilla retailing business owns both stores, the location just outside the actual 江阴路乌鸟市场 pet market by People's Square, and the original store/warehouse inside. She said that if we mated him and had babies, we could trade them in for more chinchilla feed from her store. Jodi got excited but I'm not too keen on the idea of breeding chinchillas. Then you have to deal with temperatures, genetic issues, keeping who separate from who, etc.

People on the street had a fun time watching and guessing what was in the cage. We have a hamster cage used expressly for taking Poopy outside because it's too easy for him to slip out of any of the three leashes we've tried buying for him, and his normal cage is much too large to carry. I like to overhear what people are guessing for Poopy's identity; these days, it's about 10% rabbit, 60% squirrel, and 30% chinchilla. The trash sorting guy downstairs still thinks that we say it's a cat, no matter how many times we tell him otherwise (in Chinese, the word for chinchilla is made up of the characters for "dragon" and "cat").