Pancake and Waffle (Conclusion)

The next day I went to PetSmart (not the one run by the dead-eyed animatronic… the other one) to see what they had in the way of terrariums.  After talking with a super helpful guy there I decided that a 40-gallon jobber would do nicely.  Thanks, José! You were awesome!

But where to put it?  It’s not like I could cram it onto the boy’s already crowded desk.  Really the only place it would fit would be in the middle of the room where his foosball table was.

What?  Oh, yeah.  I never mentioned that, did I?  I built a 75% scale foosball table a while back.  

Here are some pics of that.

It was a fun build but, since he never really used it, into the attic it went, leaving just the base. That surface happened to be the perfect dimensions for the new hamster home.  Yay!

But Pancake was still MIA, so, you know… Not so much “yay” for that bit.

Around 1AM the next morning my wife woke me up to say she was hearing noises coming from our son’s room.  The boy and I had crashed on the sofa in the media room after binge-watching The Simpsons and the cat was still curled in his bed downstairs, so it was time to investigate.

I glanced into the boy’s room to discover that, yes, Pancake had returned and was busying himself trundling along the noisy-noisy wheel of noise at top speed!  No way! I snuck over to the cage door and deftly closed it.  He was trapped!  Well, trapped-ish...  I then lifted the cage into the waiting terrarium and left it there.  Now… NOW, he was trapped.  We woke up the boy, told him the news, and he darted to his room.

Smiles and sighs all around!

So, yeah.  It would be like you or I breaking out of jail, enjoying a few days of freedom and then deciding to return to the prison to hit the treadmill for a bit.  Hooray for taking definitive action without the burden of forethought!

The next day we went back to the PetSmart and asked a different guy about getting a replacement Robo and told him what happened.  We (the wife and I) explained that we all knew that there were risks inherent in putting two unrelated hamsters in the same enclosed space but surely a 40-gallon terrarium would…

“Oh, no no no no!” he admonished us, overly cheerfully and certainly overly loudly.  “Robos that aren’t related will fight each other all the time!”  The boy had turned away from the shelves upon shelves of “cool looking stuff to put in an aquarium” (the terrarium stuff was lame) to listen in on the conversation. He was aware of the risks, too, but he also knew that, if they had a big enough space and didn’t have to fight for perceived resources, they wouldn’t necessarily go all psycho on each other and they would eventually get used to having a roommate with slightly different DNA than themselves.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued gleefully, “they are very cannibalistic, and they will…”

“DUDE!” I said, stopping the narrative dead and nodding meaningfully toward the boy.

The salesclerk looked at me, perplexed.  It then dawned on him that, while his message was on point, understood, and appreciated by all, his delighted tone needed to be adjusted a notch or two downwards. We thanked him for the warning and promised to look out for any signs of the little guys hurting themselves (from stress) or each other (out of the dark Cthulhu-like malice that apparently defines the dwarf hamster soul).

So… yeah.  We bought a new hamster and a bunch of terrarium stuff and everything went into their new de-luxe apartment near the foot of the bed.

After a few days of watching them behave themselves (for the most part) and absolutely launching themselves in random directions off the new and gloriously silent treadmill we saw that all was well. 

The boy drew this to commemorate the occasion:

This has not happened.

Yet…

In the meantime, Long Live Pancake and Waffle!