Peter

We have always been pet-people.  We mostly lean toward a pet of the canine variety.  Our first pets were great dogs.  Since Eric is allergic to cats, they have not really been an option to have as a pet.  So we have always had a dog.

Before we moved to Honduras, we made the painful decision to find a new home for our dog, Milo.  It was a heart-breaking thing to do, but we knew that he would adapt much better to a new family with outside running space than to apartment living.  He now lives with a great family.  In fact, he went to live with a family that used to dog-sit him for us when we went out of town when we lived in Sebastopol.  He is very happy there living with their 10 year old daughter who lets him lay on her bed.  We learned that he has become quite the gopher hunter.  Milo just had his 9th birthday last month...

...he's so pretty.

Now that we have been apartment dwellers for almost 3 years now, we were feeling the need for a four-footed pet in the house, but we couldn't see the use for a dog.  Sure, there are thousands of dogs that live in apartments in big cities, but I just can see the justice in that... for the dog or for the person.  We have friends who have to take the dog out at 5 a.m. to go to the bathroom, and they are not allowed to use the elevator because of the dog, so they are descending 7 flights of stairs in the wee hours in the morning for the dog to do his thing.  Sounds too much like having a newborn human to me, and I want nothing to do with it. 

Common breeds of dogs to see here in the city are smallish dogs.  I think the cute ones are the beagles.  The ugly ones are the schnauzers and silky terriers.  Of course, our favorite small dog lives in Sebastopol.  

Here's Theo, our dog friend who also lives in a house that we frequently house-sit at.  He is the perfect size for apartment living and has a great personality.

Photo by Linnea

But we knew that we weren't ready to get a dog with our current lifestyle, so the next best thing was to get a hamster.  We got Peter last November and his is proving to be way cooler than we thought a hamster could ever be.  

He is a Russian Hamster (did you ever know there was such a thing?) and super cute.  He's smaller than a regular hamster, but what he lacks in size, he makes up for in bravery.  He jumps off the couch, scales the walls of his cage, and runs so fast that his legs look blurry.  I read that hamsters can run about 8 kilometers a night on their wheels, and we have taken to putting him at the farthest part of our house at night and closing the door so that we don't have to listen to the proom proom sound of his wheel.