The first to fall...

Her full name was Mohammed Allah Akbar Osama, I think. This was in response to the radical stupidity of Muslims storming newspaper offices for running cartoons of Mohammed and Arresting teachers who obliviously named class teddy bears after him. But, much like all the other dwarf hamsters I've had, she got called 'little girl'. She was a sweet, even-temperred, little gray handful that managed to avoid all of the various addictions I subjected my other 'mice' to over ther years. And, I'm ashamed to say, she probably didn't get the attention most of them did. But she loved the attention she got, even from Scrappy ( I had to warn her, "Don't let the Booogle get you"). She loved her dad, even when she got left alone for a month when my leg kept me downstairs and before I said, "Duh, let's bring her downstairs".
Yesterday, I tried to give her some of that attention and found she could no longer haul her butt out of the cage door for all her efforts. She had the shakes, which seems to be a telltale of the Reaper's aproach. Still, she managed to get upstairs (she lived in a two-level, using the upstairs primarily for a ladies room) for New Years, though she looked terribly bloated. She spent that last night fairly active; it wasn't till morning that she passed from this cage. She was cooling but still warm when I found her in her little blue house- she must have seen the first dawn of 2010 in her last moments.
I placed her in her edible (but not eaten) little log house and buried her under the first tree at the head of the trail into the fence row off the back patio. Right now, her cage sits in componant pieces while I decide whether she will, like those before her, have a successor. I don't know yet; for all the less-than-attention I gave her, I find I really miss her already. Maybe that's because she was so content with any attention she got. She didn't need constant affirmation; whenever I got around to her, she loved me just the same. That indictment of myself is why I debate letting her be the last. She deserved better than she got, in life and death. But she never minded.