The Year of Two Mistakes – Part One:  The Tale of Mistake # 1

Every day, I make mistakes – sometimes more and sometimes fewer than the day before.  It was about two years ago when I made a couple of HUGE mistakes.

MISTAKE # 1:  The first was the day the boys next door said, “Mrs. B., would you like to have our geckos?”

My house is known for having unusual animals living here.  And, I don’t mean the people.  Rather, my house has, at one time or another, housed eastern corn snakes, a green iguana, guinea pigs, hamsters, spiders in cages, and ant lions (we used to call them doodle bugs), also in cages.  Then, there was the pheasant (incubated and hatched in my classroom) and Percy, the nine-lined ground squirrel brought home by my daughter from the day care playground where she worked and fed milk with an eye dropper every two hours until he could eat solid food.

And, rabbits, but they lived in their own houses – hutches built by Larry.  And, the little ones, of course; a result of a nephew allowing the boy rabbit to be in the same hutch as the girl rabbit.

So, two six-inch geckos?  Sure, bring them on.  And, so, they arrived with their habitat (a large aquarium with accompanying table for it to sit upon), water dish, fine-grained sand, and under surface heater.  Reptiles, as you may know, must have external heat to be able to digest their food.  Crickets, mostly; more about that later.  Most importantly, the two geckos were NOT six-inch geckos.  Rather, they were fully grown, ten-inch, female Leopard geckos.  I named them Yellow (because she was) and Spot (because she had spots)   They were, I think, accustomed to being held by the boys.  I didn’t play with them.  They stayed in their habitat.  Probably, very boring for them.

As I said, Leopard geckos eat crickets.  I dutifully went to my local pet store to purchase crickets and dumped them into the habitat – thinking that the geckos would eat them up.  Little did I know that Yellow and Spot would save some crickets for later.  And, do you know what crickets do at night?  They sing.  SING!  All night long.  It wasn’t long before I learned to judge how many crickets they would need for a feeding, AND to hand feed them using a pair of long tweezers.  No more midnight cricket songs.

I finally decided that Yellow and Spot had to go somewhere else to live.  Thankfully for them and me, a wonderful young lady took them to her home, along with all of their paraphernalia.  My first mistake was satisfactorily resolved.

Consider this the first installment of the “year of mistakes,” since I’m making every effort to adhere to my Nebraska journalist friend’s admonishment to keep the weekly blogs to about 500 word.  More about the second mistake, next week.  Here’s a peak for next week.

Be safe and be well.

The Cranky Crone

If you have thoughtful feedback or questions, please let me know with a comment below.