Mrs. Dave-Guy teaches third grade. They are off this week for Spring Vacation. Jack Frost, the class hamster, came home with her.
This is fun, because his cage sits on a little table in the living room, and we can look at him and see how cute he is and sometimes even take him out and let him walk on us.
Even better, Fido, the cat, does not seem even remotely interested in hunting him down and killing him.
But one of the bars of his cage broke and this morning Mrs. Dave-Guy discovered Jack Frost had pulled a Shawshank on us. He was nowhere to be found.
This was extremely troubling, as we don’t want a hamster getting lost in our house and then up and dying on us. Especially considering that it kinda belonged to the school and that the little kids would be really sad.
Fortunately, our son, Halford, the Human Eel[sup]TM[/sup], heard a scratching sound under the kitchen sink. It was Jack. How he got under there, we have no idea.
So the story has a happy ending. We fixed the cage so Jack can’t escape, the cat didn’t eat him after all, and my son got a little box of Nerds[sup]TM[/sup] in his lunch as a reward.
That’s his nickname. And a darn good screen name. His actual name is Hal. Just Hal. It’s not short for anything. It’s on his birth certificate that way.
But early on, we started calling him Halford. I don’t know where that came from.
Ennyhoo, when he would play in the bathtub, something prompted me to start shouting like a sideshow barker:
“Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and witness nature’s cruelest mistake. Yes, friends, for just one thin dime, ten cents, the tenth part of a dollar, you can see, here in his own natural watery habitate, Halford, the Huuuumannnn Eel.”
This nonsense would go on for the duration of his bath/playtime.
The really sad thing is, we never actually made any money off of it.
Thank goodness you caught him! I had a roomate in college who had two. One of each, as it turns out and in a couple of months we were infested. One could hardly sleep for all the scratching in the walls!
Hmmmm, to live life named after a super computer, or a side show atraction decisions decisions, or is it green lantern? C’mon let us know.
BTW on a totally unrelated thread I hear the Menendez brothers at home knick names were susie and bob. As to which is which check your local magic 8 ball.
I once had a goldfish, one of those black ones with the googly eyes. I traded him for my best friends hampster. I renamed her Lavern. Lavern met up with Elmer Fud and then her tummy got reeeeeeeally big. One day i went to pick her up and there were all these eraser like things hanging from her. There were 13 babies. The runt had a broken leg and didnt survive, it went for a trip down the toilet. Lavern would do things like stuff all 12 babies in her cheeks and take them to a different corner of the cage and spit them out. Lavern was an expert escape artist and would leave her cage at night and go back in in the morning. She ruined all kinds of my clothes and chewed her way into the box spring of my bed and ruined it. she chewed the clothes of my collector dolls. One day everyone of her babies got out, we lived in apartments at that time and they were everywere. Amazingly they all came back. Then it was time for the babies to find new homes so my dad would get me to ask my friends if they wanted one and they would go running to their parents begging for a hampster. Two even went on a plane with my friends that had come visiting for the summer. I used to let Lavern run around outside and one time she dissapeared down a hole. i stuck a hose down the hole and flushed her out, she came up all wet and muddy which, being 10, i thought was amazingly cute. Lavern lived to be almost 4. She died of cancer.
When I was growing up we had our share of pets, among them were a cat and two hamsters. The cat, not that it matters but his name was Perkins, loved to sit on the shelf with the hamsters cage and stare at them. Now perkins was not a small cat, but neither was he a behemoth of the feline form. The female hamster, I seem to have forgotten her name, on the other hand was a truly huge example of her species. Now Perkins was not the sort of cat that played with people. He liked playing with his catnip mouse, but when someone tried to play with him he would take his mouse and leave. So we thought nothing of it when we would play with the hamsters that he was nowhere to be found. It turns out we were wrong. One night the hamsters escaped. The male hamster went all of 6 inches out of the cage and went to sleep. We found him when we got up that morning. However the female was nowhere to be found. Strangely neither was the cat…
After searching for what seemed like hours and was probably only a few minutes I found the cat and the hamster. The hamster had the cat cornered in the basement. the cat was meowing in terror and the hamster was slowly waddling toward him as if to torture him in revenge for all the evil inflicted on hamsters by cats over the ages. I ran in and scooped up the hamster and the cat bolted around me. From then on the cat wouldn’t go within 10 feet of the cage.