All about me

So. Hi.

Darla's grumpy face. Because why not.

I am a (currently) 22 year old girl (I feel weird putting "woman" there) who, among other things, loves hamsters.


When I said I love hamsters, I mean I am slightly obsessed by hamsters. I spend too much time reading hamster forums, hamster articles, looking at hamster cage designs, reading about hamster diet, looking at cute pictures of hamsters... Of course, that means the best thing to do is to start a hamster blog, right?


I was one of those children that had hamsters as a kid, but my obsession began shortly before my 21st birthday. I was in third year at university, and my boyfriend of nearly two years had failed his second year. After two years of being so close (we met at uni), suddenly the relationship was long distance. It was something that I struggled to cope with, and one of the things that I struggled with was having someone or something physically there to love.

Half way through third year, at Christmas, I started to think about having a pet. I had always had cats at home, so that was my first thought, but having a cat in student accommodation is a bad idea. I settled on a hamster, researched lots, and once I was back at uni after the Christmas break, I went to get myself a Russian dwarf or a Chinese.

I had actually decided against Roborovskis during my research, as they were widely described as non-snuggly hamsters, and I really wanted something to snuggle. I didn't feel like I had the space for a Syrian-appropriate cage, though, so a dwarf it was. And then I got to the big green pet store, and there was this young boy who wanted the "cute" "tiny" hamster in the in-store adoption centre. As much as I had told myself I wasn't getting a Robo, I couldn't leave this little girl, who had probably never been handled in her life, to a roudy boy and the tiny cage his parents were holding. I adopted her before they could, took her home, and renamed her Darla.

This is Darla's cute face.

It turns out Darla was a boy, and he was everything I hadn't wanted in a hamster -- skittish and virtually untameable -- and yet I could not help but love him, and could not help but fall in love with the whole species. Who could not love this little face?

Since then, I've gained another hamster (a Syrian called Annie, who was also missexed in the big green pet store), attended my first few hamster shows, and have decided that hamsters have got to be an important part of my life. I suppose that means that the main reason for this blog is to catalogue my owning, showing, and eventually breeding, of these gorgeous critters.

Well, it's taken me an entire blog post to come up with a sentence describing what I am doing here. One more important point -- I tend to ramble. I suppose that can only be a good thing when you're starting out a blog, right?