R.I.P Simon...

Simon..

... seems to be getting his appetite back - he ate some cheese today!!

Simon

I realised the other day that in the melee of other issues I had blogged about, I had forgotten to mention my baby. Simon lost huge great chunks of his fur in December and has been very ill. At first I thought he was just getting old, but I thought about that for a bit and came to the conclusion that Simon is not really that old. Then I thought perhaps he might have an allergy to his bedding so I changed it. His condidtion didn't really change until a couple of weeks later when I noticed that he had lost another big old chunk of fur and that his skin seemed irritated... So, for the last month and a half he has been in and out of the vet and has been forced to take various disgusting medicines which he hates. The last time I took him, I pointed out that it was not really cost effective to come to the vet every week especially as he did not seem to be getting better or worse. The vet agreed and said to finish the medicine and if he did not get worse again, he would probably be alright. Well two weeks passed and Simon's skin got red again and he lost more fur, and now he's looking really ratty and ill, so I took him back to the vet this morning - thankfully I got the one who seems to know more about rodents than the other two- and she has given him some stronger medicine, told me I have to hand feed him pet milk 5 times a day as he has lost ANOTHER 3 grams, making a total of about 7 grams he's lost since the end of December... it doesn't sound a lot but given the size of a dwarf hamster that is huge! She also said that if he doesn't improve with the new medicine - the likelihood is that Simon only has about 4 weeks left...

Or, could it be.....

.... my favourite baby... Simon...?!

Now come on, I ask you, really, who is cuter...?!

Cahbrie.........

....... OR......

.....mary-the-hamster....?

Why Me?

Simon jumped out of his tank no less than three times yesterday, two of which were within 10 minutes of each other and at about 4.45 in the morning. Then I found him under the fridge this morning; what is wrong with him? More to the point - how is he doing it?

I spent the week making a choker out of a complex structure of swarovski beads and wire, only to put it on and decide I didn't like it. Maybe it will grow on me. Life sucks.

Simon - an unrecognised genius or a total thicky..? The debate continues.

Simon flew the coop again this morning which made it the third time. I thought I had foiled his attempts to break out of jail by moving the toy he was climbing on. Apparently, I was wrong. His pattern changed this morning though, he didn't crawl on my pillow - he just motored about my room near my bed and I was too slow to catch him. So, since it was 4.30AM I decided to leave him to it until he came back. Well, he didn't come back. So at 10.25, after I had woken up, I was forced to crawl around on the floor looking for him with a torch. Eventually, I found him in my wardrobe chewing up my Hello Kitty slippers. So the question remains; does he know what he is doing, or is he really that thick?!

Simon - an unrecognised genius or a total thicky..?

So I woke up at the unholy hour of 6.30 this morning (having gone to bed at about 3am- lovely) to find Simon wandering about on my pillow. Now being as I didn't feel like getting up right then, I thought I would leave him to motor about my room until I could be bothered to get up and catch him. I do mean motor; he does this curious snuffling thing as he explores and he's so fat that he can't really run, so he sounds like a depressed moped. Two minutes later, he was back at my pillow about to climb on my face so I had to get up and take him back to his tank. Now it might not seem like anything strange for a hamster to escape his box and go on a mission of exploration but Simon lives in a tank with very high sides and it's on the top of my computer desk, just below head height. Not only that but under the shelf is a load of junk including about 8 cardboard boxes, so I simply cannot understand how he made it out of his tank and down to the floor without killing himself. I also wonder whether he is completely thick and didn't know that he was wandering around in circles, or if he knew I would take him back to his tank and came to wake me up on purpose..

Another Waif...

Well it certainly has been a while and I am still not ready to give a full account of the last week or so as it is past 1AM already and I am supposed to be going to the choir retreat tomorrow afternoon and I have a ton of things to do before I leave, not least of all to find some decent jokes to tell Nancy's kids Aron and Shimon on the way there. I have been told they will make my life a living hell if I do not find some new ones. Little do they know that they have already heard my entire repertoire, including the all time classic:

What is gray and can't climb trees......?

If you guess the answer- I'll donate a fiver to charity and no cheating, C-- you can't enter and neither can you, jongudmund...!!

Anyway, before I embark on a joke finding mission I wanted to introduce the latest member of my household; I had a nagging feeling that mary-the-hamster's bedding might be irritating her skin so I went to the petshop to get a different one. While in there, I was once again, appalled by the shocking conditions in which the animals were kept and found myself almost in tears over the state of a Great Dane puppy who was in a tiny glass box and lolling around barely conscious... It was awful. Anyhow, cunningly the hamster supplies are on a shelf above the hamster tanks and right in the corner I could see the smallest hamster EVER, crushed into the glass by his brothers/sisters who were having a good old fight and were twice his size. And when I say crushed, I really mean crushed. I actually thought he would die if I didn't take him, although upon reflection, it may all be part of a devious plot to get soft-hearted fools to take them home, they probably go on diets in rotation and take turns to be the runt! He really is tiny, about the length of my thumb, it's actually a little frightening. He is a scrawny little thing and his fur is a little longer than mary-the-hamster's and he looks like a right urchin. He is scared of everything and the first thing he did when I got him into mary-the-hamster's old cage was chuck all the food out his food tray and sit in it. He's been in there more or less since and won't come out. I thought he was too afraid to go back down the ladder he went up to the landing, but if I pick him up and put him downstairs, he just goes and sits up there again...
If you had seen him though, you couldn't have left him there either. Everybody, let's welcome Simon to the family....

The boys at Blogger seem to have kind of sorted the photo upload problem out to some extent. It's still not doing exactly what it's supposed to, but here, at last, is Simon..... Isn't he cute?!

Escape artist extraordinaire...

At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, mary-the-hamster really is causing me a few problems. I suppose it serves me right for assuming she was smarter than she is. I had imagined a utopian existence where the two of us would sit happily on the sofa together watching The vicar of Dibley or something, where mary-the-hamster would occasionally nibble a peanut or piece of kiwi fruit from my finger tips... Unfortunately, I don't think she likes me very much. When I open the cage she immediately tries to make a suicidal leap to the floor and then starts running around like something possessed. She's already violated my wardrobe and tried to get under my futon, and then there was the time she picked up some grain of something that had got trapped under the bin and tried to eat it...
Perhaps she'll settle in soon...


In Memoriam

When I was about 8 years old I think, this new girl came to our school from Gloucester. We knew each other vaguely but were in different classes. The next year we found ourselves in the same class and at the same table. Before we knew it we were inseparable and have been friends ever since. As it happened, my Mother's family came from Gloucester too, so we had plenty to talk about when Granny P came to visit my friend, Cathy. I only had one Grandmother by that time, so it seemed logical to us that I would share. After all, really, how do you address your friend's Gran? Mrs Pearce seemed way too formal considering the amount of time I spent round their house and calling her by her first name was obviously out of the question. She was called Granny P, you understand to distinguish her from the other Grandmother who was Granny Bick. I didn't see Granny P that often but I absolutely adored her. She was so unlike anyone in my family; so gentle and always kind, I never heard her have an unpleasant thing to say about anyone and I never heard her lose her temper. I'm sure she had her faults just like the rest of us, but I never saw them, and I never heard anyone who could ever find fault with Granny either. She didn't treat me any differently than she would have another Granddaughter and one Summer she even had me to stay at her house in Gloucester with Cathy. I remember she let us stay up way later than I was allowed to at home, that was the year I discovered the marvellous TV programme called Casualty which was all the better for being on past my bedtime. She also made sure we forced some supper down each night... after dinner you understand! The most memorable thing about that holiday however, was me getting stuck in my shorts. Somehow the zip broke while I was trying to get out of them and Granny P had come upstairs to check on us and to my immense embarrassment, she insisted on cutting me out of the said shorts. Red-faced I went to bed only to find the next morning, that Granny had replaced the zip and folded up my shorts and left them at the end of my bed. Whenever I think of that incident, it brings tears to my eyes even now because it was such a kind, thoughtful thing to do, and to me, at 13 or 14 it seemed a true example of goodness. My family were well-known by the way, for a complete inability to get on with each other and I thought my Mum would probably have an absolute spack attack about the shorts. So it wasn't just that with one small zip, Granny had erased my embarrassment, she also saved me from my Mum...
I visited her a few times when I moved to Cheltenham but I will always regret not visiting enough. Granny P passed away last week at the age of 85 and even though in recent years I didn't see her nearly enough, I will still miss her. She was a true lady and an example to us all.

Rodent Trouble.

I have inherited a completely mad hamster. It isn't that much of a surprise I suppose. mary-the-hamster finally figured out that the food is on the upstairs landing, and that she has to use the fun ladder to get to it, even though I showed her where it was, apparently it didn't sink in yesterday. However, she hasn't worked out that once she's in her running ball, she has to keep running otherwise she falls over, that's quite comical. She seems to be refusing to make a nest and insists on sleeping in the spherical bit at the bottom of the fun ladder and she thinks the litter tray is full of delicious food. I have no idea how you are supposed to train a hamster to use its own version of the W.C - I assumed it would be obvious. It isn't. So she either tries to eat it or sleep in it. The only thing she doesn't do in it, is what she's supposed to do in it. Oh, and she does that all over the upstairs landing, so much for kitchen hygiene!

There isn't really much to report, the Pastor Search Committee is driving me nuts; unfortunately it's all extremely secret and confidential so until it's over, I can't report too much. Essentially though, we are going to have to start again. How utterly depressing.

New arrival.

We have this feature in our church service called the "sayonara blessing" for those who are leaving the congregation to come forward and say a bit about what they have been doing and what they intend to do, and have a prayer of blessing for their future. Now I have always seen this particular aspect of the service as absolutely ghastly. Basically because, what invariably happens is that whoever gets up there feels the inclination to gush on for about half an hour about how marvellous TUC is and how much they will miss us. Naturally by this point in the service, I am more interested in my forthcoming lunch and don't really care...

This morning, Winda from Indonesia was leaving and asked if anyone would like her hamster, Pastor Colin had already volunteered to take two- one each for his children, Erica and Calvin, who have decided that despite the fact that the hamsters are both male, they are actually brother and sister and both called Nemo... So Winda was left with a baby girl hamster which she "didn't want to have to throw away".... Lady are you kidding???! Maybe it was an English issue - at least I hope it was, she surely couldn't really have been considering that. Anyway, obviously I had no intention of adopting a hamster and when would I have gone to fetch it anyway, them woman was leaving on Tuesday. However, Winda is obviously a good deal smarter than me, and she had brought the unsuspecting hamster to church with her. I saw her and made the mistake of saying "oh I want it!" within earshot of my friend Mary, she of the uncommonly good sense- who then said "then take it!" and shoved me, and I do mean shoved, in the direction of Winda and her hamster. So now I have a new flatmate. This is mary-the-hamster. Needless to say that Mary does not approve of the name I have chosen. I wonder if you can baptize a hamster.... You know, just to make her name official....