The GirlAlive Blog

Things I’m Happy About Today

1. I have a new hamster. Her name is Luna. Her middle name is Tic. She’s bitey and aggressive and mean, but also hilarious and adorable and entertaining and beautiful. Here is a picture of Luna baring her teeth in anger because she hates the camera.

   

   And here is a picture of Luna running back to her nest in the back of the cage to get away from the evil camera. (So you can see a little of her grey and blonde coloring.)

   

   So yeah. My new hamster is anti-social and not nearly as cuddly and affectionate as Jayne was. But I like her anyway. She actually runs inside the wheel and she climbs up the walls and across the ceiling, so she’s endlessly entertaining. I missed having a hamster.

2. Jeff Zucker has been fired from NBC. Hooray! He’s an incompetent moron, and I hate when incompetent morons have jobs and I do not.
3. I finished the web site for my editing services. I’m willing to read and correct all your stuff for dirt cheap. Let my desperation work for you.
4. James Wormworth has been named the new permanent drummer for Conan’s new show. Now, many think that this is negative news because Max Weinberg is not joining Conan’s new show. But I don’t mind, and James Wormworth accepted me as a facebook friend, so I’m choosing to just be really happy for him. Cause he’s awesome.
5. Stephen Colbert testified in front of congress yesterday. It just made me happy because he was saying the same things about illegal immigration that I have: how about just giving people the option to be legal immigrants instead?
6. I got some new books at the charity shop. Husband gave me enough money for four books! He’s a really good husband, and is constantly nicer to me than I really deserve.
7. I’m scheduled for surgery to remove my ovary monster. I’ll be getting rid of that stupid thing in October. Hooray! And they’ll hopefully do it laproscopically this time, so I won’t be in the hospital for more than maybe overnight. I’ll find out more about that in about a week.
8. Julia Nunes made a video of my favorite song of hers. She’s awesome!

Things I’m less happy about:

1. I still have no money.
2. I didn’t get a book review posted today. I’m lame.
3. Spike pig is starting to show his age. He’s five years old, which is heading towards elderly for a guinea pig. *sadface*

Overall, there are still quite a lot of reasons for me to be happy today.

[edit] One more reason to be happy: Charlieissocoollike is doing this right now! That’s so awesome! I’m so completely jealous happy for him and excited to see his contributions![/edit]

Luna

We got a new hamster. No pictures yet. She’s still settling in and she’s very nervous so I don’t want to freak her out with a camera yet.

Actually “new hamster” isn’t entirely accurate. She was adopted from a shelter, so she’s a slightly used hamster. She’s a bit older, and nervous, aggressive and bitey. Most hamsters are bought for kids, and this one is not suitable for children. If we hadn’t adopted her, there was a good chance she’d end up snake food.

Before I went to the shelter, I had an idea in my head of my ideal hamster. I wanted one that was a bit older and decidedly not a baby. I wanted one that would have trouble being adopted. Ideally, I wanted a female and I was thinking that I really love grey hamsters. We walked in and they had 2 syrian hamsters. One orange and white male that was only a few weeks old. And Luna, a mature grey female that was not likely to find a home.

They also had a trio of orange female guinea pigs that I would have loved if we didn’t already have so many guinea pigs. They were gorgeous. They looked like purebreds, and they were just adorable. But we’re at capacity for guinea pigs.

On the way home, Luna chewed through most of the box she was in. I fortunately had a rip-resistant nylon bag with me that I could put the box in, to at least contain her until we got her home. I got her into the cage and she’s trying to settle in. She’s been tearing around like a maniac, examining every inch of the cage for weakness.

We may never be able to take her out and handle her, but I’m okay with that. At least we’re giving her a good home where she can hopefully eventually feel comfortable and safe.

Jayne (2008-2010)

The world has become slightly less awesome with the passing of my favorite hamster in the whole world, Jayne. We bought Jayne two years ago when Homer died and I needed a new rodent to distract me from his untimely passing.

I was afraid of getting a new Syrian hamster because so many people had stories about hamsters that were bitey and peed on them all the time and were just generally horrible little monsters. Our first hamster Binky had been so friendly that I thought we couldn’t possibly get that lucky twice. I was wrong.

Jayne never knowingly bit anyone. She never peed on anyone. She used to poop on me when she was nervous, but she hadn’t even done that after the first month or so in our house.

Jayne was physically the perfect hamster. Binky was deaf and had testicles the size of his head. Fred had a stumpy tail and a twisted spine. Dru was missing half an ear. But Jayne was just a perfect little ball of orange fluff. From her little paws to her ears, she was just a perfect hamster specimen. She was adorable and gorgeous.

Jayne was by far the most entertaining hamster we’ve ever had. She loved people and loved attention. She would climb out of her cage and into my hand when I opened the cage door. She climbed the walls of the cage to beg for peanuts. And then she invariably fell to the floor of the cage with a “ka-thunk”. She was as graceful and agile as a drunken three-legged elephant. For some reason, she loved to climb to the top of the cage next to the wheel and squish herself between the cage bars and the wheel. She got absolutely furious whenever I cleaned her cage. She never did figure out how to run in the wheel.

Jayne will remain the mascot at the top of this blog. For the forseeable future, she is my favorite hamster. I couldn’t help smiling whenever I saw her. I already miss her.

Edinburgh Book Festival

This last weekend I went to see John Green at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’ll show you some crappy pictures that are really just still shots taken from my video camera.

I also took some video when John was speaking. It is a bit crappy because we were sitting way in the back. My husband is 6′5″, so we didn’t want to block anyone’s view.

Also, while we’re on the subject of nerdfighters, my guinea pig Spike is a nerdfighter.

He has a deformed paw in the front (we don’t know how it happened and it doesn’t seem to hurt him), and the toes are separated like a nerdfighter gang sign.

Drusilla

When we got our two Chinese dwarf hamsters about two and a half years ago, we were told they were boys and we named them Nobby and Carot. Then after a few months when they very definitely did not grow any testicles, we realized they were in fact girls. We changed their names to Drusilla and Winifred, and called them Dru and Fred. Fred passed away early on from birth defects, but Dru survived until last night.

Dru loved to dig. She burrowed little tunnels in her woodchips to get around the cage. We’d see some of the bedding moving and then see a tiny head pop up under the water bottle for a drink. She also loved running on the wheel, but never when we were around. She’d wait until we turned off the lights for the night and then we’d hear a tiny “squeak-squeak” noise of the wheel turning when the house was quiet at night. It should have been annoying, but it always made us smile because she was so cute.

A couple days ago Dru heard me reaching into the peanut bag to give a few to our big Syrian hamster Jayne and decided she wanted in on the treats. She climbed the side of the cage and begged. Normally, she had trouble handling more than one peanut at a time because she was tiny. She was about the size of my thumb. That day she must have had a good grip on the cage wires with her teeny tiny paws, and she managed to shove an entire peanut in her cheek pouch and beg for more, just like the big hamster. So I gave her another peanut and another and some sunflower seeds, and watched as she easily filed them away in her tiny cheek pouches. Then she climbed down and deposited her treasure in her favorite hiding spot under the wheel.

Then the night before last night I saw her out by the water bottle when I was on my way to bed. She was staggering a little, and couldn’t open her eyes all the way. I offered her a peanut and she couldn’t grab it from me. I went up to bed and told my husband that the tiny hamster didn’t look so good. This was no surprise because she was two and a half years old (which is fairly old for a hamster), but at the same time, it was a shock because she had seemed so happy and healthy only a day or two earlier.

All day yesterday she was declining. She would come out of her bed and just stand in the middle of the cage like she was confused about where she was. She didn’t eat or drink. She didn’t react when we touched her. She was so ill that she wasn’t regulating her body temperature, and she felt cold to the touch. At one point she collapsed in the wheel. My husband and I both thought she was dead. He even put her in her favorite cardboard tube, which we planned to bury her in. Then she moved. We put her back in her cage and a short time later she managed to haul herself out of the tube, only to collapse just outside it. I could still see her breathing shallowly. She just looked like she was sleeping.

We said our goodbyes and went to bed, knowing that chances were good that she would die during the night. Which she did. I’m going to miss her a lot. I’ll miss the squeaking wheel. I’ll miss the tiny paws grabbing my finger, trying to wrest a peanut from my grip. She was never a cuddly hamster. She liked to bite, and never was acclimated to being handled. But I’m still going to miss her.

(Don’t forget I’m still accepting writing assignments. Submit your ideas in the post before this one.)

Hamsters

When I did the last post about guinea pigs, I promised that I’d do one about hamsters too. But then I got sick and then I lost the pen for my drawing tablet and then my husband found the pen but I was still too sick to draw anything. But now I’m a little bit better. I have laryngitis and a bad sore throat, but it seems to be getting better.

Anyway, our primary hamster is Jayne. She is named after the character of Jayne Cobb from Firefly. But that Jayne is a guy, and our hamster is a girl. We purposely got a girl hamster because we heard that they’re more active and that they don’t stink as much as boys. (Plus, our previous Syrian hamster Binky had a disturbingly huge scrotum, and he used it as a beanbag chair, so we wanted to avoid that.) Jayne is bright orange. She also drinks (water) constantly. So we refer to her as “Irish hamster”. She climbs the walls and begs for peanuts. Also, she has never figured out how to use her wheel. She stands on the raised area of the cage and paws the wheel with her front paws instead of running inside it. She’s already lived longer than Binky, and she still runs around and climbs the walls like always, with little sign of slowing down.

Our other hamster is a Chinese dwarf hamster named Dru. She used to have a partner named Fred, but they eventually started fighting, as evidenced by the fact that Dru is missing half an ear. Fred passed away when she was only a few months old, from birth defects. Now Dru has a big luxury cage to herself. She used to hide in her coconut house almost all the time, but lately she figured out that if she climbs the front of the cage early in the morning, my husband will give her peanuts. She loves burrowing under the bedding. She also doesn’t get taken out of the cage much because she’s a bit bitey. She is convinced that fingers might be edible, if anyone would ever let her keep chewing. She’s over 2 years old now, and she also shows no signs of advanced age.

Both hamsters love peanuts. They climb the sides of the cage and beg for them. Dru will take half a peanut and then run around the cage looking for a place to hide her precious treasure. Jayne, on the other hand will immediately stuff the peanut in her cheek pouch and beg for more. She looks at you like, “I didn’t get a peanut. Where’s the peanuts? There’s nothing in my pouches. I need a peanut.” She’ll keep doing that until I stop or until her cheek pouches explode.