No, no, no, no, we didn’t give her away. (Are you daft? She was one of Junior’s 10th birthday presents. You can’t just give away a birthday present like that. If you could, Mike the Fish wouldn’t have lived with us for 3+ years.)

No, we had a lot of issues with her in the fancy hamster home we originally purchased for her, as I mentioned in my earlier post. So we took Karen’s advice and bought a 10 gallon aquarium, one of those grate thingies for the top, a new “silent” wheel [more on that later] and a little wooden 2-story house. She digs the house. We decided that the bedroom is on the first floor, though, so it’s a non-traditional layout. I assumed the kitchen and living room were on the first floor, but that’s where she naps.

This is a good move for all of us, because I have to tell you, it’s far easier to clean a big glass square than it was to clean that nightmare of a cage. Sure, it looked good, but Izzy is a pooping and peeing machine, I tell you, and if I have to clean it more than once a week, I need it to be easy to do.

Oh, and the silent wheel. Well, it is silent. The wheel part. But the base that holds the wheel? When she’s running at full speed the whole thing kind of shakes and now that she’s in a glass box, the metal base thingy was just banging against the bottom of the tank. It sounded like a construction site. So I put a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the tank (also good for chewing!) and put the wheel on top of that. I didn’t hear her ONCE last night, which was the first time since we got her that I didn’t. I think we’re on the right path now – we just need to get Phantom to understand that she’s not a snack food waiting to be eaten.