2003-10-16 - 11:14 p.m.

What It Is, Again

Hello again folks. I know it's been a while. In fact it's been so long I feel the need to reintroduce myself. Great googlymoogly!

Hello, I'm Uberhamster! I'm a 44 year old guy who lives in a decaying post industrial city somewhere in the northeastern United States. I've been calling this city Frown Town in this diary, but that may change soon.

I've been keeping this journal for nearly 3 1/2 years: my first entry was May 19, 2000. In the early months of my diary I made a lot of progress on myself, in fact it was quite thrilling and amazing. But of course eventually I hit the law of diminishing returns, and got a little discouraged. Well, miracles don't happen EVERY day!

However, there is a tangible legacy of those amazing first months: my fianc�e, Lily. I met her through this diary, I went to visit her, and she wound up moving in with me and we've been happy as clams ever since. This last Valentine's Day I asked her to marry me, and she said yes! We haven't set a date yet - we're waiting for Lily's college career to get a bit more settled.

I'm a lucky guy in that I earn my living via my hobbies - I own a comic book store and I earn some money on the side writing about chess. My store recently had it's 21st anniversary, which would make it about 345,543 years old in comic-store years. It's sort of a harsh business.

As far as the chess goes, I've been really into chess history, and history in general for a while, but seem to be less interested in actually playing chess. Maybe that will change, maybe it won't.

As you might guess from my nickname, I keep pet hamsters. Right now I have six hammies, but four (!!) others died in the last month. The remaining ones are (in age order) Buddy, Ghostyface, Lao Wei, Amanda Panda, Pocky, and Sable. Right now I'm trying to get another litter going, but the little buggers are not co-operating. Drat!

My nom de plume comes from a large cream-colored hamster I used to have named Uberhamster, a sweet old fellow. I originally was going to call this diary Hamster Empire, but alas it had too many letters.

Right now Lily and I are playing the online game Planetarion, called PA for short. Yes, after quitting we got sucked back in again. This is starting to look like the last round of PA, but we will see. We'll also see how much I feel like boring you with stories of online gaming shenanigans. We basically returned to the game because we missed the people, a mixed bag of crazies from all over the world, but mainly centered in England, Norway and the Netherlands.

You know, I could go on with more personal details, like about my family (which is mainly dead) but I think I'll stop here. That's one of my abiding sins: going on at great length. That's probably one of the main reasons I stopped writing here: I turned it into too much of a job.

Probably as I go along I'll flesh out some of the subjects that I've touched on here, but for now I'm just going to end this so I can post it.

I'm back!