Call Geraldo, I’ve uncovered Silky’s Hidden Vault!

Some of you may recall Silky, the non-conformist hamster (since passed on). There was one week when Silky escaped from his cage and was missing for several days. We thought that was it for the little guy, since he had no source of water. Kate did sprinkle some of his food on the floor in hopes of tempting him out. One night I was walking by my office and saw the silhouette of Silky standing upright near my desk. I was able to corner him, scoop him up, and return him to his house. He immediately drank greedily from his water bottle.

We had often wondered where exactly he had gotten to those days and yesterday I found out. As part of our general house clean up in preparation for yesterday’s Devil’s Night party (see Nikchick’s blog for details and pictures and wonder at the meatfoot, or “feetloaf” as Kate calls it), I spent some serious time rearranging my office. For the longest time a good half of my RPG collection was more or less inaccessible at the back of the room, obscured by a couple years of detritus. I decided to shift things around, so I could reference books more easily when needed.

Much of my RPG collection is housed in this big shelf system I got at Ikea. It has 25 cubes that are perfectly sized for storing RPGs, and then I have many board games, wargames, and boxed sets on top. I decided to move around the contents of several of the cubes. When I moved the books out, I discovered two things. In one cube, there was a bunch of hamster food. In the cube next door, there was a bunch of hamster crap. Now this shelf unit is big, heavy, and right up against the wall. There’s really not much room to move back there and books blocked access from the front. It looks like Silky, who was always stuffing food into his cheeks and bringing it into his wheel, scouted out this lair and brought supplies back by squeezing in around the back. He was smart enough to realize he shouldn’t eat and shit in the same place, so he used the nearby cube as an outhouse. If you told me he was running perimeter security as well, I wouldn’t be surprised.

So there Silky hid out until I caught him on a nocturnal patrol. That’s probably where I would have found his desiccated corpse if I hadn’t lucked across him that night. Sadly, it was only a month or two later that Kate found Silky dead in his cage.

Now to look for the hidden treasure…