A 36-year-old female, not requiring therapy at this time.

I have had a great week.








Truly.

Amazing.

I feel like gloating.

We hatched our first morph! If you really, really want to know some basic info about what a normal ball python is and what a morph ball python is, I made a campy little page. It started out because my boss is interested in all my critters. I told her we had babies pipping and how excited we were to get to the morphs, and she asked me what a morph was. So, knowing pictures are hard to upload in a document, I made this little page: Scaly Critters. Enjoy, if that's your interest. Joni, I have other conversation topics below. We went 50/50 (the expected odds) for our black pastel/normal pastel pairing. Gideon is a daddy!


















Also, my wonderful boss sent me my own copy of the WebMD Blue Book for our area. It's an amazing tool when you have to send letters and carbon copies. This one is the large print version (yay).

KitKat's out for the summer, ManCub has one hour left (yeah, they get Memorial Day off and HAVE to attend school for the hour on Tuesday), and Tiger's Eye has finals...and my sisters and my mother are helping him. Awesome, yes? His study guides are almost completely finished, and I totally amazed everyone with my skills for Google by finding the "largest battle of 1812" by changing "largest" to "biggest" and it pulled it right up. For some reason, although I pay substantial book fees to the high school, they collected their books and wouldn't let them have them for studying for finals. Oh, the answer is New Orleans and, coincidentally, the biggest battle was fought after the treaty was signed.

Mom had surgery to get fluid out of her shoulder, and it went just fine. I made it to the hospital right before they took her in, ate lunch with KitKat and Squitch, but had worked nights and couldn't stay for the duration. She felt good enough to help Tiger's Eye with his study guides (I hope the pain pills made her good and mean), and that is so good. So, big thank you to my mom and my sisters for helping me. It feels so good to have backup!

I have a recipe for chocolate cake I'm dying to make. I made ekmek (Turkish bread) and, although I doubt it will be happening again any time soon, I had a little taste of childhood. It took four days to set up, eight minutes to knead, a few punches, and then another three minutes to knead. Like I said, it's probably not going to happen again any time soon. I have a sourdough recipe, though, on the printer, and ManCub had so much fun with the ekmek that he swears he'll help me keep the sourdough tamed.

We shall see. I hope it freezes well.

We got our stimulus check. I can get a new crock pot, which is great, because it's pathetic that I darn near needed a shrink to cope with its loss. I think I'll overcompensate by getting one with a timer. I have to be careful on bells and whistles or we're going to stimulate our stimulus into nonexistence.

Oh, another good thing: The kids' computer is, well, crap. We can't install a word processor on it, but they can surf the net and type in word pad and attach it and I can format and...and...

Google documents. Why oh why didn't I think of this before? My little writer can stop fussing at me now. Not only is it backed up, a computer crash won't end her creativity streak.

I can't even think of any bad stuff off the top of my head. My hands are tired from kneading dough and chronically tired from typing. That would be the biggie...but...but...but...I found out that wrapping my forearms in Ace bandages for a while makes a big, big difference.

Wow. Even my clouds have silver linings!

Critter heartbreak

See here first.

Today, I posted this on the forums at ball-pythons.net. If anyone has additional input from the blogging world, we'd like to have it:

I've been searching for a while now and coming up empty. We had a clutch of four eggs. When the first one pipped, one of the other eggs started to swell. It was a perfect egg before. Within hours of the first egg pipping, the indentations totally filled out, and the white of the shell disappeared, leaving it completely transparent. At this point, the snake could be seen inside, perfectly developed, but motionless. The bloated egg continued to sweat, while the surrounding eggs remained indented and unaffected.

By the time the other little ones pipped, this egg looked like a water balloon, only minimally larger at this point, but hub cut the egg open to reveal a perfectly formed, same size as its siblings, but dead baby. Heartwrenching.

What happened? None of the eggs was pre-cut. The egg was fine. We candled them and detected movement in all eggs in the clutch before the first one pipped. Within an hour or two after the first pip from another egg, this egg just filled with fluid, rounded out, and did the things mentioned above.

The rest of the clutch looks fine, although they're still pipped. We're not messing with them unless there is a danger posed by the egg remnants from the bloated egg.

Any help is much appreciated.

This is our fist clutch of the year. It's absolutely heartbreaking. The one that didn't make it had a beautiful pattern. The albino didn't prove out, but she gave off some very aberrant patterns to her offspring, and to lose one so close to the end is just hard. No other way to put it.

So, if you're a ball python enthusiast and you've ever had something like this happen, please let us know. I can't find anything on the net, and we lost a very gorgeous baby.

Gah.

To add insult to injury, Chester Junior got loose again. He's gone to gerbil heaven. We couldn't find him before the cat did.

Now, I'm going to type for colorectal surgeons, and I've already typed three reports on terminal cancer patients. Life is very depressing.

I think I'll go hand feed my bunny some hay.

My kind of Easter eggs

This is the year's first (hopefully not last) breeding success. There might be a little albino or two in those eggs. Doesn't she look like "Mine! Back off! Mine!"

Can't blame her. Now Mr. Sapphire will begin the daily chore of sitting on his hands and not checking on the eggs every five minutes. Maybe it will work this year.

Giving birth...to a dragon.

I really got into polymer-based clay at one point, but hadn't touched the stuff in six years or more. When KitKat wrote a paper about how much she liked watching me work with the clay, I got it out again. KitKat and I worked in tandem, constructing parts and working the clay until soft enough to use.

This is my first dragon, and it's got room for improvement, but the wings! I'd never done wings before, and we are very, very happy with how they turned out. KitKat had a good eye for the look of the dragon, but she loves her dragons and had a good idea of what she wanted. For more details and construction pictures, please go here.

Never mind the snake in the kitchen - beware of the cat!

Mr. Purr is at it again, and I found someone we thought we lost. At 2:00 a.m.

My life is never boring.