I am writing this column while sitting in my dining room facing a cage that is empty for the first Sunday in over five years. If someone told me six years ago that I would be writing a column about a pet guinea pig, I would have thought that they were crazy. When I was growing up, the only pet I had were fish. I had a fish tank for a few years and stopped because I was not interested. Then when my kids were younger we had three hamsters. There was more interaction than with the fish. However, hamsters are nocturnal, live a short time and are not very sociable.