Brave Art

A healthy mouse is a happy mouse. To be honest I didnt realize how much this mouse would eat after nearly 2 months he has eaten a massive bag of mouse food. If not exercising regularly they can easily and quickly become fat. The wheel in his cage seems to take care of this problem mostly but it must be very boring for him. In the wild mice would dig and climb so I thought I would build and buy some exercise equipment for him.

After a few minutes of having a nosey around he was straight up on them. I do believe that mice get genuinely excited when put with new things to do and everytime I have challenged Gizmo with a task he seems to be extremely energetic. I have recorded that Gizmo can run 10 feet per second, which is equivalent to approximately 7.2 miles per hour.

A mouse’s heart beats 500 to 600 beats per minute at rest. A mans beats 70 per minute, that’s one hell of a difference and would explain the difference in life span. An average pet mouse will live up to 2-3 years so keeping yours as healthy as possible can prolong it’s life. In the wild mice live to only 18 months. In captivity and with the proper care a mouse can live up to 5 years.

I wanted to create a simple friendly design for MiceFest so I thought I’d make a start with the logo. To be honest the idea came quite quickly while messing around with the title text (MiceFest.com). It is not quite finished but I thought I would record my progress as I design each part of the site.

After 3 weeks now of handling Gizmo he is becoming more and more tame. When I call his name he now comes to the front of the cage and will crawl onto my hand when placed in his cage. Allowing me to take him out. He now happily sits on my shoulder as I walk around the house and even falls asleep in my hand and falls asleep when I watch a movie.

He still becomes nervous at times so I still need to spend more time handling him but he has become very tame in a short space of time. Researching up on mice housing I found if you want to tame your mouse quickly you need to make his cage layout as simple as possible i.e. less tubes and things to do. This makes you it’s biggest toy and place to play. I have provided Gizmo with a wheel for obvious health reasons which he seems to spend an unatural ammount of time running round in. Mice do seem to have an endless amount of energy!

Keeping there cage out of the sun is better for the mouse. I keep it on a shelf around waist height aswell just so it’s easier to place my hand in. I have built a platform for Gizmo to roam around in and learn new tricks outside of his cage.

I have recently bought a mouse (Gizmo) as a pet to see how tame I can make him. I have been reading many Blogs and web articles on how to tame mice and some are genuinely helpful others not so. As I attempt to tame Gizmo I wanted to blog my results here.

Meanwhile I am reading a book that Steve Whiteley bought me (Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS). I have been wanting to learn HTML and web development to advance my career as a web designer.

I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to teach myself HTML by building a mouse guide. So I went ahead and bought myself the domain MiceFest.com as part of my experiment. I will carry on blogging on my progression with Gizmo and the new site as they happen.