mcgees.org

I just cleaned out the habitat of one of the hamsters (my favorite one.)  He will regularly build a nest right against his water bottle, but the contact of the bedding material to the spout causes a slow leak, and he ends up with soaked bedding and an empty bottle.  This weekend I will get some expansion modules to extend his habitat, and try moving the water to a different compartment.

The bedding was thoroughly saturated this time; I had to remove all of it, including his food store, which was also drenched.  This is obviously stressful for him, and before I had even finished putting dry bedding in the habitat, he was already arranging it properly.  He seems to know exactly where everything needs to go (they are fairly neurotic rodents, I feel.)  I wish I understood the system so that I could arrange the replacement bedding in the proper fashion.  But I don’t, so I instead watched him for twenty minutes as he relandscaped the enclosure.  Poor little guy.

It is hard to believe that it is after midnight now.  There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to do everything I want to do these days.  This is mostly a good thing: there are a lot of activities that interest me at the moment, so I am never at a loss for something to do and enjoy.  Here is a list of activities I have wanted to pursue in the past couple of days, only a subset of which have been accomplished or attempted.

1. Play with Cakewalk.  Use it to record some of my musical compositions, with multiple vocal and instrumental tracks.
2. Order more stamps from Iowa Stamps & Coins for my ongoing (but unnamed) philatelic art project.  Work on the art project.  Transfer the pieces to a new album.
3. Work on a redesign of mcgees.org.
4. Install the new printer that has been sitting on my floor, in a box, since the day after Christmas.
5. Play some more with the new TiVo.
6. Watch some of the movies recorded by it.
7. Listen to my new CDs from Christmas.
8. Research the sport of fencing.
9. Add advertising to ScotchFinder (the advertisers are arranged, I just need to do some re-coding of the site.)  Add the ability to search the database via a toll-free telephone number.
10. Research whale deafness.
11. Continue reading The Annotated Alice, Infinite Jest, and The Life of Samuel Johnson.
12. Research PocketPCs, potentially to buy one soon.
13. Make hotel reservations for the UK trip.
14. Search Fresh Air archives.
15. Buy add-ons to the hamster habitats.
16. Clean my study.
17. Reinstall Microsoft Visual Studio at home from my CDs, which I haven’t done since my hard drive crashed.

These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  (You probably think some of these are fake, thrown in for humor.  That is not the case.  Even the whale one.)  Implicitly on the list, of course, is to write about the activities in this ‘blog.

My makeshift way of dealing with the situation has been to get 5.5 hours of sleep per night.  I think this is beginning to take a toll.  It’s getting close to 12:30.  I will probably go watch half an hour of “Antiques Roadshow” on TiVo, pour a malt, maybe scoop a bit of Ben and Jerry’s (which is, by the way, now the most popular tourist attraction in Vermont.  Yikes.)

More descriptions of the activities on the list will follow, as time permits.  I have found that it is frequently easier to write about one’s experiences doing something after one has already done the something.  Wish me luck for making the time.

I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening.  I have an index card (5″ x 8″, not 5″ x 7″, as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:

(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general.  But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)

One of the hamsters bit me tonight.  It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple “is this thing food?” bite.  He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it.  Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.

Well, the hamster saga has turned out well, I think.  The pet store was willing to take the two hamsters back, and gave us a half-hamster worth of store credit (about $7 total) for each.  We went to Petsmart to purchase a second habitat so the two kept hamsters would have their own spaces.  It seems to be working out.  Both built nests from shredded bedding after they realized they were alone.

Also found … ack! … that Petsmart sells the habitat purchased on Thursday for $15 less than For Pets’ Sake.  For Pets’ Sake is a small local store, and generally I like to support stores like this, even if it means spending a little bit more.  However:

1. $15 is not “a little bit more”
2. For Pets’ Sake has a worse return policy
3. For Pets’ Sake stocks probably two orders of magnitude fewer items
4. For Pets’ Sake does not necessarily have better service.

My effort should probably be to support small business owners whom I admire, who work against odds, paying higher wholesale prices than the big chain stores, with no choice but to charge a bit more.  I don’t think my effort should be to support the theory of small business ownership.  If you want me to pay more for a worse selection, you’ve got to make it up somewhere.

There are other small businesses in the Thousand Oaks area that have a smaller selection and higher prices than larger stores, but don’t do anything to make up for this lack.  Conejo Valley Wine & Provision Co. is one, where the business model seems to be to make every buyer feel stupid (”I’ve got it!  If they feel offended and embarrassed, they will give me more money!”)  Paper Depot in Thousand Oaks (right next door to the previous store) is perhaps worse: they assume your question is stupid without even listening to it.  I was looking for #6-3/4 envelopes.  I was walked through the conversational steps of being told that such envelopes don’t exist (which they do), then that their width wasn’t 6 1/2 inches (which it is), then that that size wasn’t listed on their wall chart (which it was).  At the end of this she finally looked in her catalog and found some examples, but was unable to get me a sample envelope: I would have to pay for them in full and if I didn’t like them when they arrived, too bad.  Sorry folks … I can order out of a catalog (and for lower prices) without your help.  [--- Text removed 27 March 2001 ---]

To offset the negativity of this list, I should provide a list of small stores that do go above and beyond the call in order to provide a great shopping experience:

1. Wine & Liquor Depot in Van Nuys has the largest selection of single malt scotch in the U.S.
2. Video 4 You stocks a large number of DVDs and foreign films and employs very knowledgeable people.
3. Malibu Fish’n Tackle gave exemplary service the one time I shopped there, even though patronizing them violates my “terminal g rule.”
4. Words on Wine has beautiful items and great salespeople, although I can’t attest to anything else as I have never purchased anything from them.

Multiple hamsters in one cage is turning out to be a bad idea.  Our gamble of sociability based on their blood relationship seems to be a losing bet.

Unfortunately the store has a policy of only accepting returns of sick animals.  Our plan is this: we want to keep two of them, which will entail purchasing a second habitat.  We are going to try to return two, in the hopes that they can find good, solitary homes elsewhere.  If the store won’t give us money back, we’ll try to get merchandise credit.  And if that doesn’t work, we’ll offer to just give them back if they will sell them as pets (rather than, say, use them as feeders.)  This is my sentimentalism getting the best of me here.

I hope this all works out.

We have hamsters.

On Thursday night (14 Dec 2000) Jenn and I went to “For Pets’ Sake” here in Thousand Oaks and bought four “teddy bear” hamsters.  I had been talking about wanting some for a while, and was up-front with the fact that my primary motivation was to build an increasingly elaborate habitat of tunnels and rooms for them to explore.

But I have fallen quickly in love with the little guys.  They are such fun to watch, as they explore their environments and try to understand the world around them.  Some websites I read warned that hamsters are territorial and that it is a bad idea to keep multiple ones in a single habitat.  Other sources said that if they are of the same litter, it won’t matter (or won’t matter as much.)  We are gambling on the latter for now.

Here is a picture: you can click on it for a full-sized version.  At some point I will post pictures to the Pictures page.