I’m a killer. Plain and simple, there is no way around it. This weekend, my mom took out her three sons to a nice Sunday brunch. My brother Tom and his wife had a card for me. It was a nice card, one saying how great an uncle I was. Inside the envelope was a toy lizard. The box said that if you put the Lizard in water, it will grow to 600% it’s original size.
My brother joked that this was one Lizard that I couldn’t kill. He was wrong.
My kids placed the lizard in a small cup of water and I saw how the lizard grew. However, it began to grow outside the bounds of it’s small container. I figured that I’d place him in a pot and fill it with a lot of water.
Trying to be smart, I filled the pot with warm water. You know, chemical reactions are faster at higher temperatures, right? I mean, it wasn’t boiling water, just warm water. Well, that was enough to do the lizard in.
In about 1 hour, well, you can see the results here:
Oh the shame.
When I woke up this morning to feed Cricket I noticed that he was dead. His little face was stuck to the side of his terrarium, dried “emergency care” food serving as a glue of some kind. I don’t know what finally did him in, but he had significant disease and I suppose I was simply not equipped to deal with it.
He was still warm and soft to the touch, but we have so many heat lamps that this does not surprise me.
I set him up like he’s sleeping and my wife and I will tell the kids later tonight.
First we lose the hermit crabs, now we lose our bearded dragon. I don’t know if I’m ready for another pet.
Cricket is doing better, but he’s still in “critical condition” as you can see in this picture. He’s just so sick looking.
Take a look at this shot, taken when we first got him. In this picture, he’s vibrant and full of spunk:
He’s moving more now and we’ve been good about hand-feeding him, maintaining a good hot temperature, and you can see we replaced the seeds with paper towels. The vet said the seeds were a big problem and I’m thinking the seeds were probably our biggest mistake. The pet store said that swallowing a few seeds was totally fine. That may be true, but Cricket is still crapping seeds an it’s been almost a week since I removed them.
I went to a pet store who said that paper towels are the safest way to go so that’s the way we went.
On a side note, Vista did a decent job prompting me to import images to Windows Photo Gallery when I inserted my digital camera. This is the modeless dialog that sits on your desktop during the import process.
Many of you may recall that my family purchased a Bearded Dragon for my son’s Birthday in January. We named him Cricket since that’s what he eats. Perhaps I’ll name my next child “Formula” or “Gerber”. Leave it to Kids to come up with interesting names.
We’ve had him like 7 months now and ion the past month he’s gotten very sick. He’s stopped eating food and has become very week. The pet store people have been giving me advice on getting his energy up since last summer but Cricket is simply deteriorating.
When we bought Cricket, I was never under the illusion that my kids would care for him. I always considered this my responsibility and not theirs. I simply feel as if they are not old enough. However, I saw this as an opportunity to teach them about responsibility and to have them understand what it takes to care for a living thing. Well, it looks like I demonstrated how not to take care of a living thing since I didn’t do such a good job.
I feel bad. I’m sure there is more I could have done for him to avoid this. Read more, been more diligent in tracking his food intake, perhaps even keeping a Cricket journal.
Well, things are bad now and yesterday we brought Cricket to a vet. The first thing that became clear to me is that pet store owners, while they seem knowledgeable, don’t know jack shit about caring for a sick animal. I think they are good at maintaining healthy animals, but none of their advice came close to the advice I got from the vet. Of course, you say, the vet is a doctor.
Indeed.
So, not I have calcium drops and some liquified hay for herbivores. I need to feed this to Cricket via a syringe. I fed this to him at 6am, my wife will do it around noon, and Ill do it again before he goes to sleep.
I have a follow-up appointment next Wednesday. I am fully determined to get cricket healthy again and have him grow up to be a nice, big, happy Lizard.
If you are still reading this far and if you want to send Cricket a get-well wish, please post a comment to this blog as I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. After all, he’s not talking to me anymore.
Many of you know that my sons’ room now sports a Bearded Dragon we have affectionately named Cricket, a name we picked in honor of his favorite food.
We recently moved up from baby crickets to medium-sized crickets. The larger crickets are a heartier meal, having more juicy goodness under that hard crunchy carapace. However these buggers are also more mature so they chirp. Loudly.
If you click on the link below you will hear what my kids are sleeping through for the past week. I suspect it is just a single cricket. I noticed that one of the crickets is different from the rest, it looks like it has wings or something. Perhaps this is my suspect? If I can narrow down the type of cricket making the noise, assuming it looks different from the rest, and recognize his “kind” in the future, I’ll make sure I feed him to Cricket first!
(This file is slightly modified. I reduced background noise and cut out a lot of the clanking noise I was making as I shifted around.)
Our bearded Dragon, Cricket, wasn't too happy about having his food on his head. Moments after taking this picture, he shook it off.
Tonight, my wife and I made the trek out east to the Southampton Publick House, one of the finer micro brewery/restaurants on Long Island. We were met by a group of friends with similar interests in good beer and a familiar Long Island setting.
In fact, out of the three couples that met together my wife and I had the least history with the place. The friends we met there had a rich history with the Publick House and many tales were told of the brewery, the town, and life on Long Island.
The beer was excellent and every pint I had was superb. I think I had 4–5 pints in all but “estimates” are all I can usually manage after 3 beers. I started off with a Southampton Secret Ale, then had a seasonal Abbey Blonde, then their awesome Imperial Stout, followed by their IPA. They have many more brews, even more than those listed here.
I brought home a few six packs, one of their Secret Ale and one of their IPA. The packaging looks like this:
I also got a growler of their seasonal abbey blonde and a large bottle of their Imperial Stout. You know, to keep me going through the Spring.
If you ever find yourself on Long Island, make the trip out to the East End and treat yourself to some of the best beer you can get in the region.
Here are some photos of the trip to Southampton the village, and the Publick House.
Oh, I had to get another picture of Cricket in there. Can you blame me?
Technorati tags: beer, micro-brew, publick, ale, IPA, pilsner, bearded dragon
Hey, I want to make something clear. I am not obsessing about our new pet, Cricket the Bearded Dragon (Photoset, Slideshow, RSS 2.0, Atom). I simply have something new to say about the cute little bugger.
Today we fed him grubs! Supposedly they are rich in healthy fats and protein and they are rumored to keep in the refrigerator for about a week. They hibernate, in theory. We started off with 5 in a little plastic container and two days later one of the five turned brown. I can only assume he’ll never make it into Cricket’s mouth.
The others were good sports. When they warmed up they started moving around in a little dance which Cricket took immediate note of. Gulp. No more grubs.
They look pretty disgusting, almost like maggots except maggots are way more disgusting. I know that you want to click that link. Go ahead. Here they are:
Here is a nice action shot of Cricket about to pounce on one of the pudgy buggers:
By the way, if you want to see some awesome-looking bearded dragons, check out this guy's site.
Cricket
I thought that I would update you on how Cricket, our Bearded Dragon, was doing.
We went to the pet store this weekend to get Cricket his favorite meal, live crickets. These crickets are very small, about as long as the diameter of a penny. Cricket (with a capital “C”) will eat 12–24 of these in a sitting. As I was waiting for the crickets, I noticed that the 2 bearded dragons that were caged with Cricket when we first bought him had grown much larger than our own beloved lizard. Evidently we must not be feeding him properly! The pet-store dudes said we needed to feed him vegetables and not just crickets. Oops. Plus, the more crickets we feed him the bigger he’ll get.
So, we fed Cricket 36 crickets that afternoon and he stopped binging after eating about 20. The remaining dozen ran around for the rest of the night. When we checked on things in the morning, some of the crickets were missing and some died. After all, I didn’t put cricket-food in the cage.
I’m also cutting up romaine lettuce every day. I hope he’s getitng a balanced diet but it’s so hard to tell. I guess I’ll just keep visiting the pet store and see how his larger friends are doing. Maybe, just maybe, Cricket will one-day catch up to them.
The Python
On a side note, one time I was at the pet store and my son was anxious to take a look at one of the baby pythons they usually have stored in one of the cages. Well, he was missing from he cage and we wondered where he’d gone off to.
One of the pet-store teenagers, we’ll call him Gary, was standing in front of the cage attending a paper bag. I asked where the python was and he said that he was in the bag, eating. I asked if my son could see the python and Gary replied again that he was eating.
Slowly, I realized why he was being so “cautious.”
I turned to my son, all excited, “Giovanni, he’s eating a rat right NOW!”
Gary saw that my son and I were not bothered by the prospect of seeing a snake swallow live prey so he opened the bag. Boy was that cool.
I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Cricket, the newest member of our family:
and this is his food:
Cricket is a Bearded Dragon. We got him last week but I waited this long to mention it because I didn’t know if he’d last the week in our crazy house. We’ve been feeding him a soy supplement all week but today we treated him to live crickets. The little guys didn’t stand a chance. Cricket ate them all up in about 60 seconds. Cricket is an omnivore, so we expect to feed him lots of leafy vegetables, too.
I took the pictures you see here with my Sony DSC-R1 camera with a special adapter lense which makes focusing on small/close objects easier. I didn’t do more than point the camera and shoot after that. Flickr has all of the EXIF details if you are interested. I have a lot to learn about macrophotography so please excuse the faults in these images.
