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It rained last night and Olivia told me,

Quick! Close the windows! Wait the hamsters get wet!

Hamster escaped

Hamster escaped and wasted an hour of our precious time trying to capture it. So now it's going to spend the night in my room, hearing me snore.

Oh well, who asked it to be so adventurous.

(It's actually spending the night in my room because we did not want to risk it escaping while we transfer it into its actual home, which is a very sad pail.)

Hamsters

Four different hamsters:

The athletic baby's baby

The angry father

The sleepy baby

The greedy baby

The only time I can stroke them is when they're eating or busy running on the wheel because when they are running on the wheel, they will still be trying to run from me but they can't run away from me.

Hamsters scared

Yesterday afternoon I came home to a surprisingly sight - all 4 hamsters' cage and tanks placed in the living room:

Moved from their original places, for some reason:

So I asked my mom why were the hamsters in the living room and she answered,

Because this morning outside doing something, then very noisy. Brother was worried the hamsters will be scared, so he moved them here (out of the balcony and into the living room).

My brother is better than me!

Baby hamster died

One of our baby hamsters died.

It was trapped between two flaps of cardboard on the inside of the pizza boxes and was literally flattened to death. We didn't even know until this morning when brother opened the box and saw a furry head sticking out. I believe it struggled to death because the head wasn't squashed, just the body flattened. Perhaps the windpipe broke or the bones or something. We're suspecting it was because Olivia pushed down the cover of the box very hard yesterday and the baby didn't have enough time to react to it.

I wonder if the mother was trying to pull it out or something. Brother said when the body was being cleared, the mother was sniffing at the spot.

=(

Quotes

Part of the conversation I had with my father just now,

爸爸: 要不然我们带 hamster 去植物园 让它们跑跑，好不好？它们会不会跑掉？
我：你不会说我们绑一条绳子在他们的脖子上！
爸爸: 对 hor！
爸爸: 还是去沙滩啦！我们带我们那个木的东西 (wooden pen which we built) 放在沙滩上，让它们在沙里玩！等下它们爬出来，我们追到半死啊! 哈哈！

(Father: Let's bring the hamster to Botanical Gardens, let them run about for a bit! Will they run away?
Me: Why don't you tie a string around their necks?
Father: Yar hor!
Father: Or let's go to the beach! Bring that wooden pen and place it on the sand, let the hamsters dig! Wait they escape and we have to catch them, haha!)

Interview; Hamster

Due for an interview in school this afternoon and I'm nervous.

Number of interviews I have ever gone through: 1.
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Father hamster has yet found a new position and place to sleep in:

Vertically, between the glass and log.

We were wondering why he is sleeping in this most interesting position and I postulated that it might be because the weather has been rather warm lately and the glass is relatively cool. Oh yar, not to mention he likes weird positions. We have seen some of the 2nd batch of baby hamsters climb over him while he was sleeping like that, their foot in his eye and he did not even twitch!

4 baby hamsters

We found the 4 baby hamsters tumbling around in the running wheel, playing with each other and snuggling together, last night.

Then they froze when my handphone's flashlight shone into their faces.

Hamster sleeping

Very often, I wonder if our father hamster is normal.

The rest of them sleep in hamster-expected poses, like in toilet rolls, curled up into a ball or cuddled up with each other. But this father hamster sleeps in the oddest positions and, if I may add, oddest places. It used to be in the running wheel or in the open on its back with his mouth slightly open. Then today I found it asleep in the log I just placed in late last night.


I want to laugh when I look at this picture. He's the friendliest and tamest of the lot.

Baby hamsters

Exam's the day after tomorrow, so I've got time for a couple of posts. Like I've said before, our 3rd generation of baby hamsters are quite big already.

Firstly, to give you all a sense of how large or small the hamster is, here's a picture of the portion of the tank it's in:
See the little white container at the bottom? The little brown thing inside is the baby hamster.

Baby hamster trying to get into the container of food:

Baby hamster trying to eat big (relative to its size) hamster food:

It was all very cute and sweet so I leaned over to the other side of the tank to tell the father hamster that his babies are very grown up already:

Father hamster can't be bothered and wants to sleep like that.

Random photo of Olivia's finger and the other hamsters:

Our house feels like a hamster breeding zoo.

Second paper; Hamsters

Second paper tomorrow. I told myself I'll go to bed by 10.30pm and now it's 10.50pm. Tomorrow's a GEM paper. Supposedly easy to score. I took a day and a half to study for it. I'd better score!

Actually I took a cute baby hamster photo today because the four babies are actually big enough to run around and (try to) eat (big, hamster) solid food and I wanted to show you all just how tiny they are! However, I spent a full 11 hours studying today so I'll blog about the baby hamsters some other time.

Oh yar, there's one baby hamster that is blind in one eye. When my father saw it, he said we must keep it because it is so poor thing.

What?

I replied (exact words edited),

Are we a Hamster Disability Centre or something? First we have the 2nd smallest baby of the first lot (because the smallest one was eaten up) and now we are going to keep a half-blind baby.

I was just kidding. The half-blind baby's really cute but looks so poor thing. So unless somebody really wants it, we will keep it for sure.

And I think the female of the first lot of babies is pregnant.

Oh god. How many generations of hamsters are we going to own? The male hamster should quit being so horny already.

Hamster(s)

Not enough time to blog. Seriously, this is my most serious and most well-used semester - including exam period. Ironically, I have 6 modules and 6 papers to take, supposedly my most heavy semester so I'm supposed to be a complete wreck and all, which I still am. Sorta.

Anyway, hamsters say hi for me since I'm not free.

Tried to take a picture of father hamster sleeping with its head sticking out of the tube but it woke up and showed me his ass instead:

Father hamster peeking out

Father hamster sleeping in the wheel

I think the weather must have been too warm for it to sleep inside any enclosed area. It has been sleeping in the running wheel or somewhere in the tank, whole body stretched out. Sometimes it sleeps on its back, sometimes on its side,


sometimes it finally sleeps like a hamster - all curled up.

Anyway why the heck would it be sleeping in the wheel?!

Baby hamster

At least I think it's the baby hamster. Or it might be the father. Forgot which it was because picture taken quite some time ago. It's not technically a baby anymore but well, we haven't quite worn off calling it that. It's akin to calling a human "baby" in his/her mid-twenties.

Dammit, I'm supposed to not blog and let the hamsters do the talking.

Hamsters away from home

For two consecutive days, we have given away 3 baby hamsters out of the 5. The previously lively tank now seems a little quiet and empty with only 4 hamsters left - 2 parents, 2 babies. Father made them a multi-storey house out of boxes with many holes for them to explore and poke their heads out, just the day before. He also put in the running wheel. I presume the hamsters love the wheel because at one point in time there were 4 hamsters in there and nobody could run. They just kind of sniff around until one gets bored and jumps out. Then when there are 2 inside the wheel and one is running, the other one has to run as well, regardless of whether it desires to do so. The little ones run really slowly because they just aren't used to the idea of a wheel.

Although now you would expect them to be running about late at night, climbing everywhere in the house, poking their nose around, fighting to get on the wheel just so that nobody can run, chasing after each other and practicing their high jump by jumping against the tank in an attempt to escape, last night they were relatively quiet. Only the parents were taking turns on the wheel while the other 2 babies were out of sight. I later saw one lying in a dark area, flat on its tummy and looking rather forlorn. I wonder if it is because it missed its siblings. I would imagine it is rather disconcerting to have 3 gone missing in two days.

Two of the hamsters were given to the brother's girlfriend. The hamsters have each other for company so I reckon that's alright. The other one is now with cousin YY. It was all alone in the small tank we had placed it in and we could see it was rather afraid. It was shitting a lot and scrambling about quite a bit instead of sniffing around calmly like it usually does in a new environment. Although YY has her own hamsters and the little one is sure to be in good hands, it is its first time, and last time, away from home, all alone in a strange environment.

Thinking about it is a little sad.

Hamster fugitive

人家养 hamster, 我们也养 hamster。 可是为什么人家养的 hamster 又胖，又笨，走得又慢，我们家的 hamster 却是又胖，又聪明，跑得超快？

The male hamster is kept in a tank and had never jumped out before. We thought it was too stupid to know how to escape and this morning it proved us wrong. We think it might have used the centre of the toilet roll as a step to climb up the water bottle and then from the flat top of the bottle jumped out of the tank.

I told my brother about it at 6am this morning and he replied asking us to check the storeroom, commenting why we were so unlucky.

Yar lor. I thought hamsters only know how to mate at super speed once every 6 minutes. Turns out they know how to escape too.

So if you see a fat hamster limping along the roads, please leave a comment on this blog.

*update*
Hamster found hiding under fridge! Finally found him, I'm so happy. =D And I accidentally squished it slightly while trying to capture it.

Hamsters mating

Last night I put the male hamsters into the big tank where the female and kids are. Within the 45 minutes I was watching them, the hamsters have mated a total of 7 times, no less. The first time I saw him mount the female from behind and start to hump at rapid speed, I could not believe my eyes and thought it must have been just cleaning the top of the female hamster head very quickly. After all hamsters do groom each other. The second time it humped, I looked at them closely and was absolutely sure they were mating. By then, I don't think separating them would make any difference any more because we are going to have the babies 3 weeks later anyway.

Oh man, hamsters sure hump very very quickly! The following is a brief description of the mating, please auto-skip if you are below 18 of age or have a very clean mind.

He chases her, he kinds of climbs onto her back, uses his paws to grab her, raise her ass up and hold her there while he humps (at inhuman speed). Think doggy-style for humans. For some reason, his eyes were wide and bright while her eyes were slitted and small while they were mating. That she would scamper away and proceed to groom herself, they would play around for a bit and fight a bit. He would chase her and they would sniff each other's butt and kind of groom each other, they would snuggle up to each other, put their noses against each other (are they kissing or something? Do hamsters kiss?), then he would chase her again, she would refuse then allow him to mount her.

It's kind of sweet and very amusing to watch them mate.

Hamsters

The female hamster ran out again last night, the same one which escaped on Leap Day. According to my sister, it

...ran around and around in the wooden pen that papa built, in lesser than 1 minute!

I think she meant it ran super fast. The hamster, a she, has since bit 3 holes in the cardboard box in order to get out and each time, my father or brother would tape another piece of cardboard over the holes.
See the corners where there's extra cardboard and the Oreo covering? That's where she bit/scratched through them. The Oreo cardboard covers the latest hole.

It even managed to use its water bottle as a way to get out by climbing all the way up to the top and then jumping out from there. She made the latest hole above by climbing up the bottle and then biting a nice, round, even hole from there when we blocked her way out above with... some basket.


We couldn't shift her into a new tank (not that we have any) because she had just given birth not too long ago and we didn't want to disturb the nest she had amazingly built using tissue paper and torn up toilet rolls.

Nest of tissue paper. All hamsters asleep inside now.

Yes it looks a little tattered but we did not intentionally want her to live in this box with no view of the world except of the nice, white ceiling and our curious, oily, pimpled faces blowing bad air towards it. We had temporarily removed her from the tank which she had shared with the other male hamster before her birth because it had bit her butt until there were two bare areas. Maybe the male hamster liked a little action in their sexual activity. In any case we put her into the first best thing which could hold her, which happened to be this mandarin orange box. A couple of days later she started building a nest (I thought she was just bored) and one day my sister shouted that she saw a red lizard inside.

At a later stage when the babies are a little older, have a little more strength and were able to squirm out of the nest

All 5 babies have since grown up and are about as active as her, running all over the place. A couple of them anyway. The rest just sleep a lot. In that sense they are very alike their father. She was previously a lot more protective over her babies, but now that they have grown fur and have started running around a little, she has not been pulling tissue paper over them as frequently as in the past. Sometimes she even lets us see her feeding her babies.

I suppose they will be her babies for a while more before they grow older and become potential mates. *wrinkle nose* Incestuous! Heh.

Father just said he saw a baby hamster eat from the food container. That particular one's fast! Do they have teeth already?

Leap Year

It is now 29th February, the day which occurs only once every four years. Quite amazing. It reminds me of Daylight Saving Time (DST) where an extra hour occurs in one of the days.

February 29th 2008 is also a Leap Day which occurs only once every 28 years. A Leap Day is one where the day of the week which 29th February occurs on is the same as the day of the week in a previous Leap Year. Well, that means every Leap Year's 29th February will have its own Leap Day turn.

Do you know why Leap Year occurs? I believe the reason is similar to why there is DST, only that we don't adjust our calendar back one day as in DST.

Using a calendar with 365 days every year would result in a loss of 0.2422 days, or almost six hours per year. After 100 years, this calendar would be more than 24 days ahead of the season (tropical year), which is not desirable or accurate. It is desirable to align the calendar with the seasons and to make any difference as insignificant as possible.

By adding a leap year approximately every fourth year, the difference between the calendar and the seasons can be reduced significantly, and the calendar will align with the seasons much more accurately.

Taken from timeanddate.com

Learn more about the Leap Year here and here.

Couple of people I know are going to watch the show The Leap Years, which will be shown in cinemas today. I'm afraid I don't quite see what's so special about it. It's a romance and I don't really believe in spending money on watching romantic films.

Hmm, I wonder if there will actually be women who propose to men on this day, or if there will be more proposals/marriages on this day in general. Then their marriage anniversary will only occurs once every 4 years?!

Leap Year. Stupid hamster escaped again, ran into my room, skidded across my room and is right now taking refuge in the packed storeroom. Brother is cursing the hamster and telling it not-so-gently to f***ing come out if not its babies will die. Ok, I'm going to join him in waiting for the hamster to come out.

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Hamster ran into container of food and got captured. -_-''' Greedy hamster.