A New Life

Life is strange sometimes, wonderfully strange. Not long after my gentle, old dog left us last week, we received a call to care-take a hamster for three weeks. Today we brought "Creme Fouette" (translation: Whipped Cream") to our house. He's a little shy at the moment, having gone for a drive, been shaken (not stirred) and getting used to the new sounds and smells of our house. I am so happy to be given this chance to take care of another life, grateful to be entrusted to the daily watch. It's filling a gap and hopefully will be enough to satisfy the recent requests by Riley to have a rodent of his own. It is his responsibility to feed, water and exercise. For some reason I have agreed to the more mundane cleaning of the "cage" and tubes and the general and regular checking of the whole apparatus so that Whipped Cream, a.k.a. Houdini, does not escape. I thought it prudent to take a lot of photos early on in case I need to make a quick trip to the pet shop for a double.

I thought I would be housing a wire cage, about 1 foot by 2 feet; instead I have a space age acrylic apparatus with multiple tubes and passageways branching off. Yowza. Whoever said, "it's a dog's life" never hamster-sat a modern-day hamster.