For most college students, having a roommate means dealing with someone who forgets to do the dishes, stays up too late or occasionally eats your food without asking. For Blake Carmosin, a junior graphic design major, having a roommate means having a third adorable roommate who also happens to be a chinchilla.
Angel is a small, fluffy chinchilla who has apparently made it her personal mission to keep Carmosin busy.
Carmosin first met Angel when he was looking for a bunny. Despite not fitting the necessary criteria, Angel immediately, “caught my heart just like that, and I was like, ‘I need her. She’s mine,’” Carmosin said. “And that’s how the day ended.”
The inspiration for the name came from his other chinchilla, named Stitch. Angel referencing the duo, Angel and Stitch, as opposed to the more iconic duo, Lilo and Stitch. However, it did not take long for Angel to prove that she might not be quite as angelic as her name suggests.
“She’s definitely a little bit of a rebel, I would say, considering how naughty she is,” Carmosin said. “I guess I should have expected that by naming her Angel.”
Her naughty side was particularly evident when Angel decided that cage cleaning didn’t align with her daily routine.
“What should have been a one-and-a-half-hour cage cleaning was two hours of me trying to get her to stay in the cage with her 20 toys in there that she was not playing with,” Carmosin said.
Which led to an exasperated Carmosin.
“I was just like, ‘Come on, you have all these toys and you want to jump on top of the cage,” Carmosin said. “What’s wrong with you?’”
However, it takes real smarts to find new ways to cause havoc every day.
“She’s definitely smart. She definitely has thoughts sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes,” Carmosin said.
Despite the trials and tribulations that come with owning a pet with such a big personality, Angel is cute enough to make up for it.
One of Angel’s favorite activities is quite literally bouncing off the walls.
“She will bounce off the walls, and that’s not an exaggeration. I call those her ‘zoomies’ or her ‘bouncies,’” Carmosin said.
Having seen Angel’s ‘bouncies’ in person, I can personally confirm that is not an exaggeration.
Another habit of Angel’s is staring intently at whatever she finds interesting.
“She’ll just sit on the top shelf of her cage and just stare at me,” Carmosin said. “She’ll just stare at me for hours.”
One of Carmosin and Angel’s favorite times is bath time!
However, unlike most pets, chinchillas take dust baths. This is because their dense fur can’t handle being wet and dust is absorbent enough to remove excess oil from their coats. Carmosin describes Angel’s dust baths vividly.
“She’ll go in there and it’s like she’s in a washing machine,” he said. “She just tumbles.”
Although Angel keeps Carmosin’s hands full, he wouldn’t trade it for the world. Or a million dollars. Or a clean, non-hairy dorm lacking chinchilla hair.
