Day 8 - AKA as Day One

If the title confuses you, you don't work for RedPrairie... er... I mean JDA.   And I survived, as did most of us.  I was a little nervous during our two and a half hour 'Welcome to the new company' meeting today.  There was a lot of good information and we definitely have some aggressive goals and visions.  It's exciting.

I'm still looking forward to contributing to that vision with my new role.  It'll take me some time to get my feet wet and figure out, first, what my goals are, and who I'll be able to leverage to achieve them.  It's a good challenge to have.

Alex had his first speech class in the Waukesha school district today.  We were nervous how he'd deal with a new environment, new teacher and new classmates.  But Kathie did a good job talking it up to him, because he walked right in and started playing.  He was obviously excited about it.

One of the things I've been wanting to write about is our hamster condo.  Yes, hamster condo.  Apparently a 10 gallon aquarium is not enough room for a Syrian hamster.  I'm deferring to my wife's knowledge of hamsters and judgement on this on, as I thought it was plenty of room.  I mean exercise was hardly a problem, since she ran on that hamster wheel all the time.  Anyway, my wife began her normal level of research into a new purchase.  I don't want to say she's tenacious about finding the right item in her searches, but let's just say she puts the O in Obsessive.  After looking at hamster cages that were too small, required shipping from the UK or... well.. .just not good enough.  She settled on a 20 gallon long aquarium and an aquarium topper that sit on top to give her a high rise condo.  Well, the price range of that setup quickly hit the $150+ range.

I suggested may be we could find a regular hamster cage that I could retrofit to the top of our aquarium.  Dubious, but willing to try, she agreed and we all headed off to Petco.  Bindi barked at a cat they had and scared the bejesus out of a poor woman.  But we found a 10 gallon topper that looked like it'd work great.  We brought it home and Nibbles absolutely loves it.  After some engineering feats by both Kathie and I, we managed to attach her wheel to the top of the cage.  It's all in all perfect.  And it was only $25.

Phew.  I was worried she'd start looking on craigslist for hamster cages.  Who knows what kind of things you'd find with a search like that!