My hamster with the most personality   by Hamster Mom   I had a hamster a looooong time ago when I was sharing a house and going to college.  This hamster, "Squeaky" (actually they were all named Squeaky) lived in two Habitrail sections until I decided that was too small, as hamsters can run all around in  the wild.  So I duct-taped plexiglass around a coffee table, and that became his yard, and the habitrail was his house.  Squeaky still wanted a bigger life and started trying to jump over the plexiglass, so I taped cardboard all around the wall higher up.    One night I made a staircase out of paperback books in his front yard, going up to the  cardboard, then made a little hole in the cardboard.  Squeaky quickly discovered this, went up the stairs, out the hole, and down the long stairs on the other side down to the floor.  I let him run loose in my room at night because there was nowhere to get lost and no way to come to any harm.  He'd run around finding sunflower seeds.  In the morning he'd be curled up back inside his house, and then I'd take away his stairs.     One day I gave him peanuts in the shell, a real delight for him.  He was sticking his head out the hole in the cardboard, and I gave him about four big ones.  When he tried to go out the hole, his head kept butting up at the hold and stopping him short!  He seemed so confused not realizing his cheeks were like balloons, and there was no way he'd get out of that little hole.     Now the other thing to remember is he lived alone, and in his habitrail he was king.  One day I gave him a bean sprout.  You know it has the bean part and then the long sprout end.  He grabbed it by the bean and went down his plastic tunnel.  The sprout part tickled him on his back, and he jumped a mile!     In a way, all my hamsters were "I really want a dog, but for now I have a hamster", but they turned out to be so much fun.   © 2003 Hamster Mom