I recently remembered a few old home movies I’d made with iMovie, featuring my first hamster, Pika. (After all, the subtitle of the blog mentions hamsters, so I’ve gotta live up to that.) My second hamster, Mocha, has been featured on this site for a while now, in a short called “The Great Chicken Struggle,” where she valiantly tries to get a chicken leg-and-thigh bone, bigger than she is, into her cage.

The Pika movies date back to before my blog, so they never got in here before. The first one is called “Pika Has Lunch,” and features her doing what hamsters do as only they can do: stuffing their cheek pouches full of food. At the time, I had Pika on the dining room table and had given her a good supply of sunflower seeds. Sure enough, she stuffed her mouth full of them. But then she did something I hadn’t seen before (or since)–she disgorged them, right after having stuffed them in. Then she calmly looked at them, and then at me, as if to say, “Get a load of that!” After a minute or so, she seemed to change her mind again and restuffed her mouth full of the seeds. Then she spat them all out again a few minutes after that. I think it was on her fourth time doing this that I got around to getting the camera out, and filmed her doing it at least two more times. I forget if she stopped herself or if I stopped her. In any case, if you’ve never seen a hamster with her head twice the size of her body spitting out her weight in sunflower seeds to a game show theme, click the image and check out this movie!

Another film I found is titled “The Tissue Caper,” and is just Pika climbing out of her cage, going to a box of Kleenex, pulling a few out of the box and stuffing her cheeks with them, then going back to her cage and unloading there. But she looks pretty cute at the Kleenex box, seemingly eating tissues to a bluegrass version of “Turkey in the Straw.” Of course, she would do this with anything that could be used as bedding. I have a curtain behind where her cage was that got all chewed up when I put the cage too close and she was able to get at it. Anyway, the film can be seen by clicking on this image:

I had a third movie which featured Pika rolling around in her hamster ball to the tune of “Speed Racer,” but I couldn’t locate it. An old hard drive died, and it may have been there, but I also likely backed it up on a CD or DVD–it’s simply an issue of searching through my very large collection of discs to figure out which one it’s on. If and when I find it, I’ll post that also.

The above movies, by the way, are in QuickTime H.264 format, so you’ll need the latest version of QuickTime to run them (free download). They weigh in at about 10 MB each, so this is not for dial-up, unless you’re very patient. If they don’t play properly when you click them (different browsers act differently), then just right-click and download the link target to your disk. If you have a recent version of QuickTime, they should play then. Let me know via comments how it works!