Coffee tables have many uses. Obviously.

This past weekend was extremely eventful. Not only did we vacuum the living room rug, but we also got up the courage to remove the guinea pig cage (which was homemade and awesome, and which sat on our old coffee table, which we hadn't used as a coffee table since Em was born because we are anal in that way and decided that we would rather not have a coffee table for a thousand years than have our tiny little vulnerable and perfect children knock their little heads on a corner and end up in the emergency room getting stitches).

As you who read this sensational blog will know, our last guinea pig, Mo, passed away last week, on Mr. Handsome's birthday. You could say it put a bit of a pall on festivities. ANYWAY, the piggies lived on our coffee table for the past seven years. The table had been put in a corner of the dining room so that the piggies would be near us, because guinea pigs are very social animals, and we're nothing if we aren't extremely sensitive to the needs of others.

So, although some people thought it was disgusting and absolutely horrid that we would eat our meals in the same room as a couple of GPs, eat in their presence we did. They were happy, because they love food (HELLO!! They're guinea pigs), and they provided the family with minutes of entertainment daily. In my humble opinion, a win-win situation.

And, now that the piggies have all gone to piggy heaven, where they have an endless supply of green pepper, English cucumber, and timothy hay, we had no more use for either their cage (which we had built with our own hands, sweat and blood) nor the placement of the coffee table.

It was time for the coffee table to once again become -- yes -- a coffee table. Only problem was it no longer really looked like the sort of table one would normally put in the living room. Well, it wasn't awful, but it certainly was showing its past use as Guinea Pig World.

So, instead of trashing it, we put it smack dab in the middle of the living room. Of course. Where it will serve as an eternal memoir of Cuddles, Furry and Mo.

In other guinea pig news, I thought you would all want (and need) to know this atrocious (yet somewhat interesting) fact regarding guinea pigs and Peru. Mr. Handsome's sister is over there right now, traipsing. What else do you do there? So, in an effort to find out more about Peru, I did the old Google search, and this is what I came up with:

Not only do Peruvians eat guinea pigs, but apparently they also dress them up beforehand, and whoever's guinea pig is the cutest gets cooked! Isn't that sweet???!

Excuse me while I go stick hot needles into my eyeballs.