Hey, what's for dinner?

That was kind of what this little guy might have been thinking when I found him laying in the middle of the floor of the old reptile building today.



Sorry bub. Day late and a dollar short. Not a pinky mouse in the house.

So I ran him down to the edge of one of the bamboo groves and set him on his way.

You ever regret getting out Rich?

I do miss the hatching season. It was always a lot of excitement and always having new things pop out of the eggs. Christmas time in July.

But as for the workload, shipping hassles, retail customer headaches, hired help aggravations, overhead expenses, baby snakes that wouldn't eat, adults thinking that they really could swallow your arm if they just tried hard enough, constant attention to the mouse colony, etc., etc., etc..... Nope, I don't miss all that crap at all. We couldn't find good reliable help in this neck of the woods, and Connie and I just could not continue with the physical demands of the constant work needing to be done. There was just no question that it had to end before it killed us. My getting appendicitis during egg laying season one year was the wake up call for me that it was time.

Yeah, I did burmese and WhiteLipped Pythons and select kingsnakes back in 70's and 80's. It gets to be a chore. I now just have 5 snakes but no breeding.

I chose to cold turkey it. I know Connie does miss her leopard geckos quite a bit, though. She got quite attached to them.

But we decided we just didn't want to be tied down in case we wanted to just hit the road for a month of travelling and sightseeing. Which just hasn't happened yet. Seems that every time we would talk about going somewhere, some natural disaster would befall that area. So we just stopped talking about it to spare the rest of the world from ruin.