Paint Tomorrow Blue

Meet Lola. I may rename her, but for now she’s Lola. She’s about a year old. She comes from a very nice home that just had too many ani­mals in it. I saw her on Craigslist and decided that she needed to move to my bedroom.

I’ve really, really wanted a Roborovski dwarf ham­ster (robo, for short.) It’s kind of sad. I firmly main­tain that robos are the cutest mam­mals on the face of the earth. Cuter than cocker spaniel pup­pies. Cuter than red pan­das. Yes, even cuter than fen­nec foxes. Behav­iorally, they’re not very cud­dly, they’re incred­i­bly fast, and they’re hyper­ac­tive. Pic­ture any ham­ster you’ve met, then (metaphor­i­cally) give it a half-dozen Ritalin washed down with a liter of Moun­tain Dew. I’ve never owned one before, since they’re not very com­mon and only recently started being a fix­ture at the big-box pet stores.

I was talk­ing to Naomi about my plans to adopt a robo. “They’re very, very small ham­sters,” I explained.

“You mean, com­pared to those giant ham­sters you have now?”

“Well, yes,” I answered, before I even real­ized she was kid­ding. My cur­rent ham­sters do seem giant to me. Perspective.

This started a few weeks ago. I walked into Pets­mart look­ing for a Care­fresh sale, and saw a big pile of robos curled up in one of the cages, being adorable. I thought that a pair of the crit­ters would be nice, but decided to delay the adop­tion until after pay­day, and as a reward when I cleaned up the liv­ing room.

After mak­ing this deci­sion, I had an ani­mal lover’s crisis–should I adopt two robo sis­ters, which I’ve always wanted…from a chain pet store, thus sup­port­ing the rais­ing and sell­ing of ani­mals in con­di­tions I don’t approve of? Or should I wait until a reg­u­lar Campbell’s dwarf ham­ster showed up on Petfinder or Craigslist? A robo show­ing up was so unlikely that it was out of the question.

I knew what I should do, but I also knew that I’d feel guilty one way and bratty the other, so I just didn’t adopt a ham­ster at all. Until Lola showed up on Craigslist!

So she’s here, next to my desk, and she even has her own uStream chan­nel. You know you want to watch it.

She’s so cute, I can’t bear that she won’t let me pick her up and cud­dle her. But I’ll manage.