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A New Home for Izzy

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.

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The Story of the Little Hamster that The Mom of the House Threatened to Kill

Izzy is cute, that’s for sure. She should get down on her knees and thank the good Lord above that she is, and that I love my son, her owner, because she would have been released into the snowy wild this morning if I had my way.

You see, in the middle of the night I had to go and move her cage because she had decided to move all of her bedding and a lot of her food into the “wheel” section of her cage. And when she decided to run in it in the middle of the night, all the bedding fell back out into the tube and left only the seeds, which rattled around as she ran. And ran. And ran. It was like someone shaking a pair of maracas.

So at one in the morning, I stumbled downstairs with the cage, shoved stuff out of the way and put the cage on the counter. I then stumbled back upstairs to try to fall back to sleep.

This morning Mr. Dump broke the news to me that I hadn’t pushed things quite far enough out of the way, and Izzy spent a large portion of the night chewing through the strap of a [discontinued] Vera Bradley purse that she had pulled in through the wire of the cage.

I am so very very very angry with her. There had better be a letter of apology on the door of her cage when I get home tonight.

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