I’ve done a lot of weird stuff when it comes to animals, I guess. I’ve hand fed a praying mantis. Played hide and seek with a hairless rat. Even gotten “attacked” by a jumping spider that I was filming a little too closely. But now, I have something to add to my list that I never imagined. I’ve been hand watering the roaches that I raise as food for my lizards. Yup. You read that correctly. I actually get water in a little dropper and give it to them one by one. I’m intrigued at the fact that they seem to remember what I’m doing and will actually grab the dropper to steady it so that they can drink more easily. Now don’t get me wrong. I won’t be snuggling up on the coach with them to watch some TV. But I find it fascinating that a creature so quickly despised by most people can exhibit behavior that is so opposite of what you would expect. They truly are incredible little machines once you pay attention to them.

The wife and I made it to the reptile show held recently in town.  We usually go to every show if for no other reason then to look at all of the cool reptiles and amphibians.  The nice thing about these shows as compared to the show a Wesselmans Nature Preserve is that you can buy at these shows.  So if you see a Panther Chameleon that you just GOTTA have, you can buy him right there from breeders and people with the same interests as you.   While I was mainly on the lookout for an Egyptian tortoise,  I got pulled into the newest feeder bug situation.  It seems these orange spot roaches are the perfect low maintenance feeder bug.  So I bought a colony for $10  which contained about 25 roaches of different ages.  I definitely have a mature breeding mail and female.  Given a week or 2, my play is to have a completely established colony setup to always have available feeders for our lizards.  So, I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the critters taken last night when we were feeding them.

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Halloween seems to bring out the creative side of me and Emily.  Whether it’s making our costumes or carving pumpkins, there’s just something fun about making scary things.  So, I thought I would post a few pics of some of the things we’ve done so far for Halloween 2010.

This is the Nerf gun that Emily “steampunked” as an accessory to her Halloween costume.  Who knew a little paint, gears and tubing would make a bright yellow Nerf dart gun look like a bad ass Blade Runner meets Bioshock weapon?  There will be a couple more to come as we finish them up.

Here’s the pumpkin I just finished carving.  It didn’t turn out near as well as Emily’s gun, but I still like it.  In case you couldn’t tell, it’s a ghoul screaming. 

Emily carved this one last night.  She’s a big fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, so a Jack Skelington pumpkin was a perfect fit.  Another cool thing about this one, it’s a fake foam pumpkin so we can set it out year after year.

That’s a few of the things we’ve gotten done so far.  There should be some more in the next week so check back, if you want to.