What’s this?

Bright and early this morning, FedEx was at my door with a small box for me…

Hmmm… whatever could it be?

Are those four tiny eyes looking at me?

I’ve known for awhile that I wanted to keep something other than the corns snakes. I fell in love with Rainbow Boas the first time I saw a picture of one, but any time I saw one up for sale I had to admit that they were just too darn expensive for me.

Until earlier this week when I stumbled across an ad on Fauna listing a pair of them for less than I’ve ever seen a single one sold for. These were the last of the breeder’s ‘08’s, and they were priced to move!

So they got here this morning, a little chilly but still looking very perky and beautiful!

Here’s the female when I first took her out of her deli cup. She was being shy and hiding her head from me.

There’s a peek at the face. Once she warmed up she started sniffing around and checking me out. Be sure to click on those pics for the full sized photos so you can see why they’re called Rainbow Boas.

Once she got into her new vivarium she took a nice long drink and then curled up in her warm hide box.

The male was last out of the box, and right away he appeared to be more outgoing.

He immediately started crawling up my arm, smelling the room, and posing pretty for the camera.

Is he a ham or what?

I have to tell you, the pictures do not do these guys justice. They are so shiny, and the light refracts off them in a beautiful iridescent rainbow. They’re also smooth as silk. I can’t wait to get them settled in so I can start handling them regularly. I can tell they’re going to be a lot of fun to take care of.

I swear, this is it for the new acquisitions for awhile! lol Kauket is developing egg follicles, and since she’s big enough, Chad is loaning me a male that he didn’t use for breeding this year to see if she wants to be a mommy. If she lays a clutch, I’ll be too busy taking care of them to want anything new for several months. :D

Hugs,

Bullet Time

Earlier this week it was my birthday.  No, I’m not telling you how old I am.  :Þ

John and the kids got me some fun presents.  One of them was a wii fit, which promptly told me I was fat.  *sigh*  I knew I should have waited until after my b-day to step on the dang thing.  My favorite present by far though was Bullet, a Roborovski Hamster.

Yes, I have another animal: no, I don’t need to apply for a zoo permit yet.

No need to adjust your monitor, he really is that cute.  He’s about the size of a large cotton ball, and he won’t get much bigger than that.  He’s also really, really fast, hence the name Bullet.  Tiana picked out the name, and we all agreed that it fit him perfectly.  He’s so fast that when he runs on his wheel he appears to hover because his legs move faster than the eye can see.

He’s mostly a watching pet, and not a snuggling pet.  Because he’s so tiny, and so very fast, if he gets away from you you’ll never catch him again.  He’s also really wriggly when you pick him up, so dropping him is almost a given.  He is a lot of fun to watch though, and he will let us pet him, which is just about as good as holding him.

MacDuff thinks we brought him home a little nom, and wonders when we’re going to let him out so he can eat him.  Bullet, for his part, has already figured out that Duff can’t get him through the glass, and has started in on the taunting.  He likes to run around his tank while the cat is watching him.  This, of course, sends Duff in to a frenzy as he tries to figure out how to put his paw through the glass of the tank to get the yummy morsel.

Does anyone really wonder why I have so many animals?  They give me hours of joy and amusement as I watch them tease each other.  :D

Here he is curled up and sleeping in his little house.  Isn’t he just the cutest ball of fluff ever?

Today I brought in some dandelions, from the crop we have growing out in our yard, and gave all of the rodents a treat.  Bullet really enjoyed the noms.

I want to thank everyone for the birthday wishes that were left on my facebook page and at the CD forums.  It was sweet of y’all to remember me!

Hugs,

Iowa Part 2

I really didn’t mean to make you wait this long for the second installment of our Iowa trip. Let’s just say it’s been a pretty crummy week and you wouldn’t have wanted to hear from me before now anyway. :)

So, here’s the back story…

Alexi has always been pretty firm that she didn’t want to do any serious dating in High School. The girl has goals and a clear plan of what she needs to do to complete them. She wants to be a surgeon, and she knows she’s going to be in school for quite awhile longer, so why make it more difficult than it needs to be?

She hangs out with a large group of friends comprised of both guys and girls, and she’s watched her friends do the dating thing. We talk about it a lot, and to be honest (no offense kids) the High School dating thing is pretty silly, full of a lot of drama and very little reward. So watching the tableau has pretty much cemented Alexi’s decision not to date seriously for awhile.

Then in walks friend Paul…

Paul and Alexi hung out in the same group for a year or two, they were good friends and that was about the extent of it until last spring when they both realized at about the same time that there was something more than friendship going on there. The only problem with the whole thing was that at the end of the year Paul was moving to Iowa.

Well now doesn’t that put a crimp in the whole love story?

So they decided to continue to be just friends, keeping in touch with each other using the phone and internet as best they could. Frankly, everyone observing figured that, like most kids who move away from each other at that age, the friendship would just fade away. The funny thing is though, it didn’t. Instead it seemed to grow stronger.

You would have thought I’d have learned by now not to expect my kid to act normal.

A year passes, Paul is a senior in high school, Alexi’s a junior, and they still talk almost every day. They decided to drop the whole friendship façade awhile back, and now will officially tell you that they are indeed dating. Paul’s senior prom is coming up, and there’s a little bit of drama associated with it. Not a lot, but enough to make it clear that Alexi’s not entirely happy with the situation. So John asks her, “Do you want to go? Does he want you to go?”

The answer was a resounding YES across the board.

So the next thing you know we’re in the car making the long trip to Iowa... I’m going to stop here because at this point in the telling I can usually see that whomever I’m talking to thinks we’re off our rockers insane. We’re not, well not completely anyway. I’ll admit to not having a complete set of marbles, but there is a reason behind this particular insanity.

Alexi is a good kid, and I’m not talking the mother speak here. You know the code: Jane’s a good kid, I just wish she’d get better grades. Or: Joe’s a good kid, I just wish he’d call me when he’s going to be late. No, in this case Alexi is a good kid, end of sentence.

Permit me to brag for a moment. Since the fourth grade Alexi has been on the honor roll every quarter without fail, and most quarters she scores well enough to be on the high honor roll. During her sophomore year she was inducted into the National Honor Society, and this year she was approved for the National Merit Scholarship. She was the only one in her class to qualify for the last.

Alexi is very open and honest with me about what’s going on in her life, and what she’s thinking and feeling. She frequently discusses problems with me and (surprise) actually listens to, and respects, the advice I give her. She doesn’t hide stuff from me because she understands that losing my trust would hurt us both. She’s responsible in that when she tells me she’s going somewhere and/or doing something she does just that. If her plans change she calls and lets me know; even though many times she could have let it go and I would have been none the wiser.

Alexi is a trust worthy, responsible young lady. End of story.

Well, not quite the end because we’re in the car heading to Iowa. John and I decided that a weekend trip to reward her for her constant good behavior, which would also serve as a birthday present, would go a long way towards showing her how much we love her and also that we respect and understand her feelings.

So she went to the prom with the guy who calls her his sunshine, and from here I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves…

Hugs,

Postcards from Iowa

We just got back from a weekend trip to western Iowa. I’m sure you’re wondering why we went to Iowa… You’re not alone, about six hours into the drive I was asking that myself.

Anne: “Refresh my memory, why are we here again?”

John: “Damned if I know.”

The only one who really knew why we were there was my oldest daughter Alexi, but we’ll get to that later…

A lot of people believe that most of the mid-west looks the same. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana are all farming states, but you’ll have to trust me here: that’s where the resemblance stops.

I’ll be the first to admit that southern Wisconsin is not going to win any awards for beautiful scenery, and southeastern Wisconsin can be pretty darn flat. It is nowhere near as flat and featureless as Iowa though. You don’t have to take my word for it, I have photographic evidence.

Iowa:

Wisconsin:

These pictures were taken about 2 hours apart, about an hour away from the Mississippi river into each state. Now, John says he doesn’t see any difference (city boy), but he’s clearly blind.

Think it’s a fluke? Here’s more photographic evidence.

Iowa with it’s lovely flat featureless landscape of mud, with the occasional tree and/or house breaking it up every ten miles or so:

Wisconsin with rolling hills, patches of grass and forests of trees:

I can imagine that during the summer when the fields are filled with corn that it’s just as boring to drive though Iowa as it is in the spring when the fields are filled with mud.

No offense to any of my readers who may live in Iowa. I understand that it’s a lovely place to grow up. The crime rates are so low as to be almost non-existent (probably because you can go weeks without seeing another person), which makes it a perfect place to raise a family. However, I would like to state for the record that secluded doesn’t always mean safe. Ed Gien lived in the middle of nowhere too. Personally, I like knowing that the neighbors can hear me scream if the occasion arises. Call me crazy.

So anyway, after driving for eight hours, we arrived in the picturesque village of Storm Lake. It sits on the edge of Iowa’s fourth largest lake, which, living next to lake Michigan as I do, I would normally call a pond. We stumbled out of the van, eager to get into the hotel and stretch out our stiff muscles, and were greeted by a stench so bad we all immediately started gagging. We did find a slight respite from the smell inside the hotel room, but it was such a pervasive reek that it almost felt as if it invaded one’s pores on a cellular level. There was no real escape.

In trying to describe the smell I think Alexi did it best when she said it smelled like “rancid bacon set on fire along with someone’s smelly gym socks that had been vomited on.”

Yup, it was that yummy.

We had checked into the hotel before actually arriving, it was past midnight in a town that goes to sleep at 9:00 pm, so we were stuck there for the night. I had dreams of falling into a vat of rotting bacon fat as I slept; it wasn’t pleasant.

We checked out as soon as possible the next morning and learned that the hotel backed up against a meat rendering plant. When the wind blows from the north it makes the hotel nearly uninhabitable. We happened to roll into town on one of those lucky days.

Aren’t we just special?

Now I know I sound pretty snarky, but the truth is that we all got a good laugh over it, and we’ll probably be talking about it for the rest of our lives. Or at least anytime we eat bacon together as a family. The perfect moments in life loose clarity over time, but the bad ones seem to stick with you forever. You may as well get some laughs about it so that the remembering isn’t quite so miserable, right? So we laughed, we joked, we teased, and John and Alexi made sure to order bacon at lunch the next day just to make the rest of us gag.

I’m noticing my post is getting pretty long here, so I think I’ll divide it up into two and you’ll have to learn the reason we were there in the next installment. I will leave you with a few more pictures from our drive though.

When you go from Wisconsin to Iowa you cross over the Mississippi river, which Tiana and Jenna were really excited about. Tiana made sure I snapped some pictures (even though it was cloudy and raining, not ideal for photography) so that she could blog about it later.

CJ was not as impressed as his younger siblings.

Here’s a picture of one of the bluffs that border the Mississippi on the Wisconsin side.

When I was a kid we used to travel to the northern part of the state a lot where the bluffs are majestic and beautiful. Some have lookouts where you can go take in an unparalleled view of the river, which goes on for miles. The bluffs in the southern part of the state are much smaller, but still rather pretty.

About twenty miles after crossing from Iowa into Wisconsin, on the south side of Hwy 11, we found these cool sculptures in a field.

Jenna thought they were real fossils, and no amount of talking would convince her otherwise. They were pretty cool though, enough so that we pulled over to get a better look at them.

Later on in the drive we came across this, which has to be the saddest industrial park I’ve ever seen.

That’s right, the industrial park is a farm, complete with plowed fields, not a real building in sight. Welcome to the Midwest, our industry is your food. :)

I’ll be back later with the rest of the story, until then…

Hugs,

Hedgehog Photo Shoot

I woke up Zathras early today thinking that he might be more inclined to sit still for some pictures if he was tired.  That lasted for about thirty seconds, and then he was running all over the place, chasing after Duff, and generally trying to make my job difficult.

I did get a couple of cute shots though.  :D

This is from when he first woke up.  He was grumpy, so he had his quills sticking up a bit on his forehead.  When he does that he looks an awful lot like his namesake:

See?!?  I told you he looked like a Zathras!

Here’s some playtime on the carpet.  His nose is blurry because he was running right at me.  I think he was hoping to get a sniff and maybe a chew on my lens.

Here I gave him a treat, hoping to get him to sit still for a picture.  He did stay still for a minute, but now he looks like he’s snarling.

Ok, maybe if I throw a blanket on the floor he’ll burrow around in it and I’ll get some good shots.

Nope didn’t work, he stayed still long enough for me to drop him and click the shutter, then he ditched the blanket to go running after the cat again.

Oh well…  He’s still cute, even if he doesn’t make a good model.

Hugs,

So Retro

Do you need a good laugh today?  Well look no further!

Yup, that’s me in all of my 70’s glory.  I know, I know…  You don’t have to tell me…  I’m stylin’!    lol

That haircut is called a Dorothy Hamill pixie cut, and it looks suspiciously similar to the way I used to have my son’s hair done.  I know that I was not the only poor girl out there who had this hairdo foisted on them as a child, and I know that, like me, all of those girls now refuse to have their hair cut any shorter than their shoulders.  In fact, Dorothy Hamill is single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of women who have a fear of short hair cuts (properly known as Tonsurephobia).  She deserves a medal…  Oh wait, she already has one.

Now, how about that orange leisure suit?  You want one, don’t you?  There’s nothing like a soothing palette of colors from the seventies…  Harvest gold, burnt orange, and, oh yes…  Puke green.  I’m not sure if that’s a shirt or the upholstery fabric from my mom’s couch.  And what is with the gigantic collar?  I was in danger of suffocating if a stiff breeze blew one of those flaps in my face.  If that style comes back into vogue they’ll have to put warning labels on them like they do on plastic bags.  “Warning, this collar presents a suffocation hazard to animals and small children.  This is not a toy, do not allow children to wear unless closely supervised by an adult.”

Last but not least, check out my teeth.  You’ll be happy to know that in later years they got even worse.  Not only where they huge, but I also developed a wicked overbite.  By the time I was twelve I could eat an apple through a fence.  It’s ok though, it was nothing that gnawing down a couple trees (and a few thousand dollars in orthodontics) wouldn’t fix.

So why am I putting up this picture for public ridicule you ask?  Well, you see, I got my hair done yesterday, and the completed ‘do had my children pulling out this picture for comparison.

No, I didn’t get the pixie cut.  :Þ

When I was in my early twenties and started having children, a weird and awful thing happened to me.  My hair started changing…  Drastically!  I lost the strawberry blonde color and it turned brown with a slight red tint.  It also went from straight to really, really curly.  I used to spend money on perms and hours in the bathroom curling my hair, and now I spend money on dye jobs and hours in the bathroom (ok, twenty minutes tops) ironing my hair flat.  It’s not fair, why can’t my hair ever be in style as is?

I’ve been accused of dying my hair to cover up the grey (yes, I have some), but the truth is I don’t.  I started dying my hair long before any grey showed up.  I do it to bring back the red that I lost with each pregnancy.  I’m vain that way, and I got tired of people asking where Alexi’s red hair came from. 

Over the winter I had it dyed a dark auburn with blonde highlights and bright red lowlights.

Yesterday I decided to do something different for spring though.  I had all of the color stripped out (that was fun, my eyes still burn and my scalp will never be the same), and I went lighter.  I told Karen, my awesome stylist, to take me back to my childhood (minus the pixie cut) and make me a strawberry blonde again.

So she did…

That’s my color now, and it’s remarkably similar to the color it was back in the second grade.  Jenna even dragged out the lovely picture above to critique Karen’s work.  The verdict?  She did good!

I’m really happy with it, but I get confused every time I look in the mirror.  I wonder how long it will take before I get used to it.  lol

Hugs,

Should I be Worried?

Jenna likes to take pictures, she even received her very own digital camera for Christmas, and most of the time she takes pretty good photos. I think the most interesting thing about her portfolio is looking at the world through her eyes; everything is so big.

I was browsing through her photos today though, and I started to notice a theme. Tell me what you think…

So, do I start saving for therapy now? lol

hugs,