Construction Chaos Leads

to Eighth Street Upgrades

by: TRINITY WHITEFORD staff writer Road construction is a common source of frustration for anyone who has to drive any distance in their daily lives. Traverse City residents have dealt with quite a bit of construction in the past year or so. Remember the major delays during the recent U.S. 31 construction in Eastbay Township? Ugh! From Front Street to South Airport Road, and more recently Eighth Street, both commuters and businesses have been inconvenienced by the construction. Unfortunately, road construction will remain a part of our lives and stress levels until we take to the air with flying cars, or is it flying pigs? We tend to forget that there is more upside to road construction than the day it is finsihed. The new improvements to Eighth Street are definetly an upside for TC travelers. Among those improvements are: - Bike Paths - Mid-road blocks - Stop signs - Redone sidewalks

Eighth Street under construction, September 2019

Photos: M. Moeggenberg and H. Huschke

Page by Paige: Ratting Myself Out

by: PAIGE CONNERS content editor

I got my first pet rat when I was in elementary school. I had been begging my parents to get me a puppy or a kitten or something for years. I wanted a creature to baby. I had my dolls and my toys, but I wanted a living, breathing thing to care for. We already had a dog and our cat didn’t get along with other cats, so those were both out of the picture, but much to my surprise, in second grade, my mother bought me a rat. I was obsessed with the movie The Secret of NIMH at the time, so naturally I named her Nimh. She lived in a cage in our dining room, and she was my best friend. The companionship of a rat, a creature stigmatized by society for being a dirty pest, was never something I envisioned myself needing as a socially awkward grade schooler, but Nimh helped me through those trying times. Despite the way the majority of people viewed her, she was an adorable, intelligent, charismatic creature. Other’s opinions of her did not take away from her good qualities, something I hadn’t considered when looking at myself. I had always felt like “the weird kid,” and I never felt like I had any friends. I felt like every one of my peers saw me as, well, something akin to a rat. Nimh helped me realize that that didn’t matter. When Nimh died three years later, it sent my entire family into mourning. She was a cherished member of our household and none of us felt like we had spent nearly enough time with her. My mother told me I couldn’t get another rat. It would make her too sad. However, this June, I convinced her to allow another rat. Two, actually. I had learned that rats do much better when they live in the companionship of other rats. Unsurprisingly, I talked about nothing but my future pet rats for weeks. I asked anybody who would listen if they had any ideas for names. In the end, neither of their names came from the list I compiled. My mother bought me two female rats, and I named them Effie and Sage. Effie is your typical, run-of-themill, albino fancy rat. She’s quite small and incredibly smart. Sage, however, is not so smart, but we love her anyway. Sage is a hooded light brown fancy rat with dark red eyes that appear almost black. She’s bigger and sturdier than Effie, but she’s also scared of pretty much everything. I can safely say that adopting rats back into my life was one of the best decisions I’ve made. When I’m sad, I sit down at the chair I’ve pushed up next to the cage (so my cat can look at them without breaking the cage door, as he’s done before) and watch them going about their day. I’ll stick my hand in through the door and both of them will pepper me with kisses. I’ve discovered that they both love hanging out in my hoodie while I do my homework, and Sage enjoys playing with the touchscreen of my phone. They love

pretzels and will play together all night if I give them a pretzel stick to share. They’re wonderful. It is perplexing to me that so many people take one look at a rat and deem them unclean pests. I get that there is foundation of collective human experience with rats in cities and as carriers of contagion, but there is a whole other side to these creatures that people don’t see. I don’t think most people realize is that there are different types of rats that look and act vastly different. Most people who own rats own fancy rats, which are domesticated descendants of the brown rats that live in the alleys of big cities. Fancy rats are also the type of rat used in many research projects, except when they’re used that way, we call them lab rats. And do you know why scientists and doctors and other scholars choose to experiment with lab rats? Because they’re one of the smartest rodents to live on our planet, as well as being incredibly loyal and very easy to train. Rats have a long list of good qualities that people don’t see unless they look deep-