The GirlAlive Blog

This is my 100th blog entry (counting the previous stuff from diaryland).  I wanted to post something significant here.  But instead, I have stuff about my hamster.

I have reason to believe that Binky may be possessed.  Or at least crazy.  Binky has a cage designed like this:

The food bowl is mounted recessed into a little hole, and Binky's nest is built under the food dish, and he gets to it by going through the doorway under the ramp.  One morning, my husband and I came downstairs to find Binky's cage like this:

He had pulled out the food dish, dragged it to the other side of the platform, and filled the food dish hole with wood chips.  We put everything back, and he did it again a few days later.  He didn't like that we would wake him up by taking the food dish out (usually to fill it).  

We formulated a plan.  We would buy a hamster igloo to give him a new nest, then we'd get a heavy ceramic food dish, and plug up the hole under the food dish and the doorway into the nest area, so that we have better access to him and he can't trash the cage like a rock star in a hotel room every night.  It would look like this:

So I got to work and took the plastic platform out of the cage and left Binky in the cage, all exposed and annoyed that I had woken him up in the middle of the day. I modified the cage, blocked off the openings to his old nest, then went to install the new thing.

I opened the plastic top of the cage, thinking that I'd just grab Binky, put him in his plastic rolling ball thing, and then do what I needed to do with the cage. It didn't work that way. Binky launched himself over the side of the cage, off the coffee table and onto the floor, all on one lightning-fast movement. I found out that flying hamsters make me scream like a girl. Then I chased Binky around the living room until I finally caught the naughty little rodent. He didn't bite me, which was good. He just looked up at me like he was all sweet and innocent.

I put him into the cage with the new igloo and the nest blocked off. He filled his cheeks with most of the contents of the food dish, then tried over and over to get through to his old nest. He tried to dig under the wall. He tried to dig under the other side of the wall. He tried to move the food dish. Finally, I picked him up and put him inside the igloo. After that, he got the hint and made himself a little nest in there. He is currently asleep in his new nest. But I'm still a little afraid to see what he'll do to his cage during the night. He's crazy.