Welcome to surreality

Sheesh. It feels like I am constantly busy now.

I got my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful green tree python last week. Did I mention he's absolutely beautiful? I've been doing research on these snakes for YEARS, and I've finally gotten the exact one I've wanted. I'm really excited and happy. He's a 2 year old who hasn't *quite* changed completely to green, so he's still pretty yellow with just a tiny tinge of blue. :)

I ordered small frozen rats from RodentPro.com, but they messed up my order, so I won't get them for another two weeks - which was really upsetting at the time, but I'm dealing with it. I was unhappy at the thought that I was going to have to buy him live feeders - which can be pretty dangerous for a captive snake because they fight back and the snake doesn't always have room to escape. (Although this little guy does, I got a HUGE cage for him. Just as soon as I get a decent photo of the entire cage, I'll post it. Meanwhile I've posted the photos I DO have of him.) Even if damage to the snake isn't an issue, live prey often bring mites with them which can be AWFUL to get rid of. Anyway... it turns out I didn't have to be concerned. Petsmart has frozen feeders, though not in the size I needed. I ended up buying a package of four medium mice for $10 - which is terribly expensive, but should do until I get my order in.

He looked like he was hunting within the first four days I got him, which is a VERY good sign. It means he's feeling comfortable and safe in his new home. He's actually adjusting much faster than I would ever have expected. If I want to, I can probably *very* carefully start handling him occassionally after next week. I'll probably give him a full three weeks just to be safe, though. It's always better to give reptiles more time to adjust than less, and a green tree python will always be more of a look but don't touch type of animal.

Anyway, since he seemed to be hunting, I fed him last night. He took two medium mice with no problem at all, and seemed quite content. I'm really happy overall. I'll probably name him soon, as I get to know his personality a little better.

The iguana is jealous, though. :D At least it seems that way. He's practically *begging* for my attention anymore, when he used to be a mean ornery little thing who seemed to barely tolerate me. (I say that affectionately.) But he hates it when I pay more attention to the snake or uromastix than him. Little bugger. It's kind of funny. He gives me the iguana stink eye all the time.

So, in other news....

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Well... not a whole lot is going on here. My mom just had very minor surgery and I stayed home from work on Friday to take her to get the proceedure done. She was feeling great the first two days, but today she's been in a lot of pain, so depending on how she feels tomorrow, I may stay home again. We'll see. She's doing really well, though. Just normal after effects of any surgery.

Other than that nothing special going on here. It's a little boring, to tell the truth. But soon to pick up speed, I'm sure. I'm planning on pioneering in March, so that will be very nice.

Finally, finally, finally!

After *years* - literally - of wanting one, I'm finally getting my Green Tree Python in February.  At least they're holding him for me, so I believe I'll be getting him in February.  If not, I've got a little neonate on reserve for the spring (she should be a yearling by then).  That one, though, will be about double the price because I'd be getting her from a breeder, but she'd also come with feeding and care records, which I'm not getting with the other guy.

I'm so excited.   :)

Here's a picture of a similar yearling Morelia Viridis: http://www.curtus.com/Gast/Morelia%20viridis%20Sorong%20TL3.jpg

This little guy is just starting to change his colors.  See each baby is born either red or yellow and then after about a year they begin to turn green - or in rare cases, blue.  by adulthood they become fully green or blue.  They really are beautiful snakes, and probably my absolute favorites.

And I can't believe I can finally get one.

So now comenses building a cage for him.  I found a wonderful little cage design online and got some instructions from the builder.  It's made entirely of plexiglass and PVC piping.  It looks amazing.  However, I'm probably going to start with this old display case I have in the shed.  I'll drill holes in each side for air and I'll have to rig the lights to the top of the case. I may also need to get a heat panel for the lower part of the cage, since he'll need a horizontal heat gradient rather than a vertical one.   That will be a bit of a challenge.

The best part, though, are his perches.  I'm going to go buy some PVC piping about 2-4" in diameter, then use a blowtorch one it, and start twisting it around.  When I get a nice fun shape with it, I'll continue to blowtorch it until it becomes this lovely brown color.  The whole thing then looks just like a tree branch.  It's really cool.

Here's where I got the idea, and instructions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smotz/243528527/

Isn't that beautiful?  I would love to just have that little cage itself, but since I do have this old piece of furniture sitting around...  We'll see.  I may save the display case for a cage for a water dragon like I had originally intended.

But I'm still excited!  I can't wait to start building.  And then get my snake.

Taken directly from one of my reptile forums:

"!FREE! Quality logos made here..
I have been using photoshop for about 2 or 3 years now and i would like to make a logo for a breeder that is starting off or one that has sucificient experience . My current version of photoshop is.. Photoshop cs3 extended."

It goes on from there.

Aargh! *pulls hair out*

I love that. "I've been using photoshop for a couple of year so I can make you a logo!!!!1"

That's like me saying "I've been driving for two or three years so I can fix your car!"

No. There is so much more that goes into a logo than being able to use photoshop. First of all, most good logos are not built in photoshop because it is a pixel program - which means everything has to be built to the size of the project with a really high resolution or it will not print well. Most logos are built in vector programs so that you cen use it at any size and it never loses its clarity.

Second - just what does everyone think a designer does - sit down draw a pretty picture and that's it? It takes a lot of time and research and effort to come up with a good logo for a company. Even the ones that look impossibly simple like the Nike swoosh. Designers typically do days of research into the company, the market, what's popular and what's likely to last so that the logo uniquely fits that company and helps draw in customers.

Augh.

Sigh.

Never mind. I could talk about this all night, but I won't. I just wish there was some way to tell these guys that just because you've got a bootleg copy of photoshop doesn't mean you know anything about graphic design.

Okay I'm done.

But speaking of reptiles, I should post the pictures here of my scars from when my iguana bit me.

I don't know why I didn't post something about it here. I'm a bad blogger.

At the end of August, my lovely, sweet, charming six foot iguana decided to take a taste of my hand. Ow that hurt. He bit me across two fingers and sliced pretty deep. I had my hand in bandages for two weeks. I'm pretty sure the scars from that are here to stay. Almost two months later, those areas are still a bright red. It's kind of cool, actually. When I put my fingers together, you can actually see the shape of Don Iguan's mouth.

So I'll post the scar picture in just a second.

Oh and to answer the first two questions everyone keeps asking me, yes the iguana is still alive and yes, I still have him. It wasn't really his fault. He was agitated, and I wasn't being careful enough, that's all.

http://wbztv.com/topstories/local_story_189090132.html

No really. I couldn't make this stuff up.

Lately I'm not sure I actually do sleep.

Anyway, a link: Http://www.killerpaint.com - Coooool. That takes some serious skill and a very steady hand, believe me. Their True Fire stuff is amazing.

That said, not much is different from my last post.

For some reason, I'm not sure why, it only just occured to me to take the Watchtower/Awake Mp3 cds, and the Bible Mp3 cd to work with me. I realized that I routinely listen to music for eight hours straight. I might as well listen to those, too. It's actually working out really well. I was struggling to keep up with Bible reading, and definitely with magazine reading, and now I just listen to the CDs for a couple of hours, and I actually get a lot more out of it because I"m not as distracted. Cool.

Well... that's pretty much it...

So, yeah.  I'm finally updating.  A lot has happened, but not really anything to write about or anything.

I uploaded two new photo sets - one for Don Iguan, reptilian romeo, and one for the pictures I took of the MAARC Alfa Club when they stopped by my work on saturday.

This job is corrupting me.  By the time it's done with me, I swear I'll know how to build an Alfa from top to bottom.  We were having a meeting about the upcoming catalog.  These are the meetings where I'm usually lost as Paul and Keith go back and forth about part function.  Suddenly I realized I knew exactly what they were talking about when they wanted to show the sagging motor mounts and why the bleeder kits needed to be extra emphasised going into winter.  It's scary. Especially with all the wiring diagrams I've been doing lately.  I'm going to know how to completely wire a spider soon. ;)

So that's work.  And I'm writing this at 11 pm, and I've had a very long day - so I'll leave it for now.  Next time I'll write about my awesome outside adventure with the ig.

So my family went to Fredericksburg yesterday and came home with both Guitar Hero II (which I really wanted because I played it at a friends house and was instantly addicted) and DDR (which my mom wanted because SHE played it at a friends house and was instantly addicted).

They're all downstairs right now playing dance dance revolution, which you will never, ever get me to play in public. I have no rhythm whatsoever, and have yet to actually hit more than two moves in a row.

Guitar hero, though, I'll play anytime. It's fun. I'm not great at that, either, but I can hold my own.

Forrest, the little bugger, took to both games with the speed of light, and has yet to do badly at either one.

I hate people who are naturally talented. ;)

This is one clean chimp!

I'm wondering why they sedated her. I would have let her finish cleaning and paid her with a couple of bananas. After all, who am I to stand in the way of a monkey and her housework?

I'm sorely tempted to go find a monkey and train it to do all my housework. How cool would that be? Say a friend comes over and spills crumbs all over the floor. I can simply say, "monkey, clean up the crumbs!" and my little monkey minion would clean the floor right up. Wouldn't my friend be super impressed then?

Cleaner monkeys would be so much better than regular monkeys, I think, because they'd clean up their own poo after they fling it at me.

I want a cleaner monkey.

(I just realized that Judy the monkey is almost fourty!  I guess I didn't really think about that before.)

A family in our congregation had a couple of hamsters that turned into a whole bunch more hamsters.  So yesterday, we took a couple of them off their hands.

The day before, my brother had gone out with some friends of ours to Fredericksburg, and somehow managed to find a Superman hamster cage.  It quickly joined his collection of all things superman.

Today, playing with the little tyrants, we decided on similarly themed names.  So welcome to Zod and Grunt 1!

Grunt 1 is actually the cuter of the two, but pretty much dumb as a brick.  Follows Zod around the cage and then keeps falling when they're in the hamster wheel together.

Actually, they were both hand raised, so they're really gentle and friendly.  Zod is fond of peeing on you, though.

My family got reassigned from the Kingdom Hall book study, to the Pechan's book study.  I had never been to their house before tonight, and it was a nice little country house with the porch and everything.  Very comfortable.  Except that my mother forgot to let me know that they had cats.

About five minutes into the book study, I was sneezing and my nose was running pretty badly.  Still, it wasn't until my lungs started to lock up, that I turned to my mother and asked if they had cats.  I could see the dawning guilt in her eyes.

I stuck it out, though, and afterwards I had some chicken fingers and cake (it was treat night) and headed outside until the others were done talking.

Fun.

Looks like I'll be going back to the Kingdom Hall book study. 

Stupid allergies.

Now I'm on my nebulizer, sucking down Xopenex and nursing a really sore throat.  I'm not going to get much sleep tonight, I think.  The nebulizer boosts adrenalin. 

Allergies, I truly despise you.

We're getting closer and closer to our congregation's splitting.  It will then be the Culpeper congregation and the Madison congregation, 2 of 3 sharing the hall.

It's a good thing.  Our congregation really is too big now.

Still it'll be a shame.  As much as you like to say you'll still keep up with everyone, it just doesn't always happen that way.  There's a few people I really hope will still be in my congregation.  But no matter how it shakes out, it will be for the best.

But it looks like it may happen in the next couple of months.  They're getting close to putting up lists of who is going to be in which congregation.

Does anyone else have a nostalgia collection, or am I just weird like that?  I mean when you find something that reminds you of something that happened when you were a kid, or a song that was popular at some time in your life, or things like that.

I do that a lot with books that I used to read when I was little.  I tend to collect and play games that I used to love too.

It's strange what will remind me of the past, too.

Just thought I'd share.

So before the accident, this was my big news.

I just got a PowerBook G4 Aluminum for really, really cheap. I love it.  So does Forrest.  He's so jealous.  But it's great. 

One of the tech guys used to work for Apple, so he periodically gets really good deals on macs of all kinds.  He was going to sell me a MacBook Pro for about four times what I paid for this (which was still an excellent price), but he offered this one to me first.  Good thing, too.  This has better specs that that one.  The only thing the G4 doesn't have that the MacBook did was the Intel Core Duo processor, which I'm not super excited over anyway.

Well, I'm just happy I have something portable I can do my work on now.  I even got Adobe CS for Zippo with it.  Cool, huh?'

Eh, maybe that's only cool to me.

My mom, my brother and my brother's friend were all in the van when it was hit by a cement truck.

Everybody is fine.  My mom has a hurt shoulder and they probably all three are going to be achy for the next couple of days, but that's the extent of the injuries.

Apparently what happened was that they were on 229, which is a two lane highway, one lane going each direction.  My mother stopped to make a left hand turn, and the cement truck didn't.  What's more, he decided to swerve into the LEFT lane (where she would have been turning), managing to take out just about the whole left side of the car.

Somehow this is her fault.  The police want to charge her with improper lane change, even though she had her blinker on and slowed to a stop.  The cement guy told the police he didn't have time to stop, and they believe him and want to charge her with the accident.

Does this sound wrong to anyone else?

The guy at the insurance company said he's going to investigate, because they don't think that sounds right either.

How can police be so dumb?  Really.  I just don't understand.

Anyway, I doubt she's really going to be active for the next week or so.  I'm still going to try to make the funeral tomorrow, but I don't know if any of the rest of my family will be coming.

Fun call to get at work, by the way.  My boss heard me say, "Is everyone okay?!" and immediately asked me what happened when I got off the phone.  Turns out, your family getting hit by a cement truck is a sure-fire way to get a half day at work.  Who would have thought?

Right. Well, I couldn't think of an appropriate title.

Mooving right along. Yes with two "o"s. Try and make a cow sound when you read it. It just kind of flows that way. It works even better if you picture the cow from cowabduction.com being whisked away into the sky. Man, that makes any day better. Hey aliens, leave our cows alone!

So despite having got the painful little flu shot at work, I think I might have gotten it. Or some kind of nasty cold that makes your joints hurt. I blame it on my lack of immune system. Stupid immune system said, "I'm just going to the store to get milk!" Next thing I know, it's on a plane to Hawaii, and I'm stuck with a dozen doctor bills. Typical.

I've gone back to wearing normal shoes again. Yay! No more hobbling around in one shoe, and one weird looking sandal.

Construction time begins. Probably sometime early in January, I'm going to start build the top to the iguana's cage. I wish I could show you guys. I took pictures, but somebody (I suspect my father) ran of with the cord that allows me to transfer my pictures from my camera to the computer. So now I have a ton of really interesting photos that no one will ever see. Until I buy myself a card reader, that is.

Anyway, I'll take some measurements some time and post them, but the cage as it stands now is very, very wide, but not tall. So the iguana can move around fairly comfortably, but he can't climb, which is something iguanas need to do, or they get restless. So I'm building a top portion onto the cage he's got now. It'll probably be something fairly simple, like wire mesh, but I'm debating whether or not to supplement it with plexiglass. I'm going to build him a sort of reptile stairway and a couple of basking areas, and a nice sized cave that he can go to when he feels threatened.

Did I write about this before? I feel sure I might have.

Anyway, I'm also pricing a misting machine. Iguanas are tropical animals, so they need a lot of moisture. Right now he's got a couple of dishes of water. I'd like to set up a mist to go off at intervals during the day, just like they would in a real tropical environment. I've found a couple that will do what I'm looking for, but they're kind of pricey. The cheapest one so far is $109.99. (Big Apple Herp mister) So that's something to save up for.

But, while I was searching for misters, I found this heat panel, from Pro-products.com. It basically acts as a heat lamp, only as a long panel you can affix to the side or top of the cage. That really might help keep the temps and humidity levels up.

The trick is that I need to make all these additions to the cage detachable, because otherwise we'll never be able to move it if we need to. Already if we turn it on its side, we can barely fit it through a doorway. We can only do that if we take off the wheels on the bottom of the cage. So we'll see how much of this I can actually do. The cage mister, certainly, and I'm going to build a top portion. I just have to be careful how I plan it.

Ugh. My car's doing this stupid shudder/buck thing when I reach speeds it used to be the smoothest at. (65-70) That's annoying. I guess I'll pay a little visit to a mechanic this weekend. I'm going to be really annoyed if it turns out to be something stupid. On the other hand, I'd rather it be a cheap, quick fix, then something drawn out and expensive.

I have "Peter and the Wolf" running through my head right now. Does that make me weird?

If you can, catch Reanimated on Cartoon Network. Funny movie. Completely random in pretty much every way. I found it highly amusing. But then, I find most things highly amusing. As long as they are weird. And random. Cheese.

This is really funny.

One of our former circuit overseers, Bro. Kitz, who is now in a congregation in Leesburg, I think, sent an elder in our congregation a picture of one of those signs outside a church.  You know those signs where they put "clever" sayings to get people to come to their services?

This one said: "Welcome to Babylon the Great"

Huh.

Do you think they had any inkling what that meant?

Also, a fun quote from Thursday night by, who else but Bro. Yowell:  "Solomon ended up having 700 wives and 300 concubines. And 1,000 mothers-in-law."

:D

He's the one who told us all the Don't fly off the handle joke.  In service.  (Let me know if I haven't told you that one, because it's funny, but it's not a joke you expect to hear from an elder out in service.  He's really crazy.)

Heh heh. When I logged on I looked at the "popular tags" box and the words "horrid" and "pink" were side by side. Since that's pretty much my sentiments on the color, I thought it was pretty funny.

That is all.

My record holds.  I have not broken any bones.  Yay!

However...

I have these three little bones in my foot.  On the x-ray they look like spores, actually.  But most people have two, some of us were born with three.  I wish I could have taken pictures of those x-rays.  They were interesting. Anyway...

Whatever I did to my poor foot pulled two of those bones away from each other.  So it's going to hurt for awhile still until scar tissue can form to bridge the gap. Or something.  It was kind of the end of the day appointment, and we were all a little disjointed.

So I have to wear a special sandle/boot thing on my left foot for the next three to six weeks.  Fun.

But at least it isn't actually broken.

Can you possibly think of a dumber injury?

No wait. Here's the story.

I was carrying a couple of bowls downstairs to the kitchen. Now, I'm pretty sure that my house is conspiring to kill me, because where the bottom four stairs usually are, today there was air. One minute I'm minding my own business, the next, I'm kneeling on the floor, my face centimeters away from broken glass bits, thinking, "Duuuh, whaaaa?" (Isn't my mind amazing? It's really lightning quick in emergency situations. Old quick-wit, that's what they call me.)

Immediate crisis taken care of, (i.e. floor cleaned up and evidence ferreted away to the trash can) I thought I got off pretty easily. My right ankle hurt a little, and is still giving me slight twinges every once in awhile, but everything else seemed fine. Then my left big toe decided it needed attention.

I'm really kind of disappointed in my left big toe. It never gave me trouble before, unlike other parts of my body *cough, lungs, cough*. I thought we had a pretty good relationship, actually, me and my left big toe.

I guess this goes to show that you really can't trust anyone.

Anyway, long story somewhat shorter - the toe might be broken, but we're not sure. My foot's swelling nicely, and painfully, but I don't have a fever. It doesn't really feel broken to me, more like sprained.

Ah. There we go. There IS a dumber injury than a broken big toe. A sprained big toe. How stupid will I feel if I have to go around explaining to everyone who asks, all concerned, that I fell down the stairs and *sprained* my big toe.

I can just picture it, "Oh this bandage? I fell down the stairs. Yep, and sprained my toe. Yes I said I sprained my big toe. What? Stop laughing! It hurts, you know. Poopyhead."

I'm really glad we don't own a video camera. Just in case it's broken, we splinted the toe with pieces of popsicle stick and tape, then wrapped an ace bandage around my entire foot. So now I'm waddling around the house like an umpaloompa gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I'm thinking this was probably not the my most shining moment.