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“Fetch me another bale of alfalfa!” – Chinchilla Thor

When it comes to Halloween costumes for small critters like ferrets, guinea pigs, and hamsters, your options are somewhat limited. As an owner of an adorable bunny (who was featured in Quirk’s craftbook Microcrafts) and a chinchilla (who has yet to make his published book debut, Margaret!) I feel the pain that small animal owners experience around Halloween.

I mean, everyone else gets to dress up their larger pets, their cats and their dogs, in various costumes. I watch them all get posted to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… all with a rising jealousy in my heart. What about me? What about my need to take pictures of my pets looking adorable?

After fiddling around Etsy for a bit in an attempt to find Halloween costumes for small pets, I found a treasure trove thanks to this blog post. Let me introduce you to Marmota Cafe, an Etsy shop opperating out of Washington, D.C., who seems to specialize in great costume options for tiny, furry friends. All the costumes run from $9 to $18, and are designed with the comfort of your small pets in mind.

Have a look, and prepare to smile.

Today is Take Your Dog to Work Day! My beloved dog Javier made a visit to the Quirk headquarters to help out at the office (we are a pretty small operation after all). 

Australians love celebrating Australia Day for several reasons.

Not only is it a public holiday (and we all love those) but it’s a time to gather the crew together and celebrate what it means to be an Aussie. Think playing cricket in your togs with ice-cream running down your arm coz it’s 40 degrees outside.

Photo by Michael Peligro

For anyone who has ever had a dog, you will know that they are more than just a pet. A dog is a friend, companion and to many, a family member. Recent studies have actually shown that the average dog has the intelligence of a two year old human with a vocabulary of 165 to 250 words.

So, in honor of man’s best friend, we are going to take a closer look at five of the best canine companions… in comics.

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein with their poodle

Just when you thought the holidays couldn’t get any weirder, along comes Take Your Dog to Work Day.

This holiday was first celebrated in 1999 to promote pet adoption from local shelters and humane societies. Employers are encouraged to open their offices to four-legged friends on this one special day.

But these authors? They celebrated Take Your Dog to Work Day every day.

Ann Patchett makes her home in her hometown of Nashville with her husband and their dog, Rose. A self-proclaimed late-in-life dog owner, Patchett equates her relationship with the mutt to falling in love.

“I could hardly sleep at night for watching her sleep. She was small and white; maybe a cross between a Jack Russell and a Chihuahua, without the deep neuroses of either breed. If shedding was an Olympic sport, she would have brought home the gold. I was besotted.”

I’m obsessed with my North American Green Tree Frog. His name is Abelard (as in Heloise and Abelard). I rescued him in Salt Lake City from a shipment of trees that came into a Lowe’s Home Improvement all the way from Oklahoma.

I didn’t bring him with me to Philadelphia when I moved here last fall, and I’ve been driving my family crazy asking them almost daily if they’ve remembered to check on him, water him, give him crickets. “Did you spray the frog?” I always ask. Which really means, “Did you use the reptile spray bottle filled with room temperature water and pump it 40 to 50 times into his terrarium to mist the air since he is from a humid climate and Utah is a desert?”

He’s a tough little guy. The people at the pet store said he’s never make it that first day when I bought the terrarium, a soaking pool, and a container of crickets. “He probably won’t last more than four or five days. Frogs just don’t do well transferring from the wild into captivity. Keep the receipt.” Keep the receipt? So I can return the terrarium when he croaks? Abelard has done just fine, going on three years now. Who would think you could be that attached to a frog? Go figure.

So for me, it’s in honor of Abelard, and not Mark Twain, that I’m celebrating National Frog Jumping Day. The roots of this holiday come from Mark Twain’s first short story, the famous “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It was first published in 1865 as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and has also been called “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” In honor of the holiday, you should read the short story.

It’ll take you five minutes flat and you’ll feel very literary. Barring that, I’d say go to your local pet shop and buy yourself a green tree frog. Call her Heloise.