Alice the hamster has nine lives. Seriously.

The hamster cage has two openings, one in the front of the cage, and one on top. The other night, I took her out on the top of the cage, because that’s where she was roaming around. (The cage has levels and tubes and such, for the adventurous hamster in your life.)

I let her roll around in her ball for a couple of hours, even though the constant banging invariably drives me batshit motherfucking crazy, and then I fed her and placed her back in her cage.

Hours later, I was lying across my mom’s bed, reading. I was in that comatose condition I tend to fall into when ensconced in a particularly good book, so when my mother walked in the room and screamed, “ALICE!” I didn’t even look up.

She hit me on the leg and screamed, “I thought you put Alice back in her cage!”

“Wha-huh-I did!”

Yet there was Alice, toddling calmly through my mother’s room with her rotund self, as Skittles the cat looked on from a mere two feet away.

Shit.

I flew a good three feet off of the bed, book flying, and grabbed at the hamster, who eluded my grasp about seventeen times. She may be a butterball, but she is wily. Finally I caught her and stuffed her back into the cage, noticing that I had left the top door of the cage wide open.

Let me explain the logistics of this. In order to escape, this Mission Impossible-assed hamster had to climb out of the cage, scale down the cage, jump off of a foot-and-a-half-high chair, and flee a room that usually contains at LEAST two cats.

Then she had to make it through the kitchen and the hallway to gain access to my mother’s room.

I was pondering all of this when she began to spit things out into her food bowl.

Hamsters are food hoarders. They store massive amounts of food in their faces, ostensibly for “later”, and then either eat the gross stuff or spit it back out. I call this Hamster Bulimia.

Alice started to spit, and what she started to spit was cat food.

This ballsy little creature was actually sitting in the kitchen getting her grub on out of the cats’ bowls, probably for quite some time from the looks of it, and the cats didn’t maul her to pieces? Unreal.

She also spit out a medium-sized craft pompon, which probably came from under my mother’s bed.

I can only imagine the havoc that would have been wreaked had the hamster hidden out until midnight and crawled under the covers with my mom, but I sort of wish it would have happened, and that I’d have been there to see and hear it.

The screams would have been heard in Nigeria,

Apparently our cats are either really, really shitty mousers or they have come to accept Alice as one of their own, because this is the third time she’s gotten out and they haven’t laid a paw on her.

As much as the noisy little bugger drives me up a wall, I’ve sort of come to admire her tenacity, I can say that much.

In other news, I sold my weight bench. Goodbye, ghosts of workouts never completed! Goodbye! Now the damn thing can stop STARING at me every time I go down into the TranceCave, and I am a hundred and fifty dollars richer. Score!

In still other news, the fam is at church, and I am sitting here internetting and drinking coffee like a freak.

Do I feel guilty?

Not in the slightest.

Happy Sunday.

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