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To me, freezing cold and snow aren't necessarily the most miserable weather. Instead, it's temperatures in the 30's and raining.
This morning I needed to bike to a pet store to buy spare crickets to feed all the hungry reptiles and frogs on campus. Normally we rear a sufficient number of crickets in house, but the addition of the frogs kind of caught us off-guard in terms of the extra crickets needed.
The cricket shopping options out here are limited (you might scoff, but the two closest pet stores have closed down in the last several years). The store I wound up deciding to go to today will sell me what I want, but is a trek to reach, and then it's another trek to get from it over to campus. Today they had as many crickets as I wanted, plus also some cartons of Dubia cockroaches, and an interesting product I'm skeptical of, a fake rock structure that claims it has seeds for live plants that will grow once it's in an aquarium. We'll see. It at least looks all right.
There were two sections of the ride that were especially miserable. I first stopped by the bank to deposit some work reimbursement checks, which put me near Central Ave., so then I had to head towards the SUNY-Albany campus to the pet store. That whole region is a bicycling Bermuda triangle, which is how I foolishly wound up following the Goog's instructions to ride in the dirty gutter on Western Ave. Ugh. The second miserable part was right after leaving the pet store, when it started to rain in earnest and I had to traverse through an intersection with freeway on/off-ramps. By the time I got to campus, I'd burned through the rear brake pads I put on just a week or two ago, and it looks like something wedged in one front brake pad caused it to scrape curly metal shavings out of one of my front wheel's rims. Ugh.
But I made it to campus, and it looks like all the insects survived, so that counts for something.
The various aesthetic improvements I've been gradually making to the animal-rearing situation is helping to make the animal-rearing tasks more pleasant, at least.
For example, it's now fun to watch the bettas eat for a couple of minutes when I go to feed them. I was going to put these two females into a colleague's tank, but they're so cute that I've been procrastinating on the changeover. They are a variety known as koi bettas.
I've decided to name this male Clifford. I really need to put him up for adoption, though.
My students named this guy Josh Allen, and I heard that shortly thereafter his namesake won some sort of MVP award for some sort of sportsball.
Gari, of course, is always Gari (updated spelling to reflect that she's female, per student request):
The feeding clips I got for feeding the horseshoe crabs seem like they're making the crab feeding easier, which is great. There's one feeding clip in the foreground of this photo, that also has a mesh support to contain the squid pieces in place where the crabs can get to them (ie not floating at the top of the tank). It's not clear yet whether the crabs can get the squid chunks out of this one, however.
Overhead view:
View of the entire flow-through saltwater tank:
And now I suppose it's time to get back to other work.
This morning I needed to bike to a pet store to buy spare crickets to feed all the hungry reptiles and frogs on campus. Normally we rear a sufficient number of crickets in house, but the addition of the frogs kind of caught us off-guard in terms of the extra crickets needed.
The cricket shopping options out here are limited (you might scoff, but the two closest pet stores have closed down in the last several years). The store I wound up deciding to go to today will sell me what I want, but is a trek to reach, and then it's another trek to get from it over to campus. Today they had as many crickets as I wanted, plus also some cartons of Dubia cockroaches, and an interesting product I'm skeptical of, a fake rock structure that claims it has seeds for live plants that will grow once it's in an aquarium. We'll see. It at least looks all right.
There were two sections of the ride that were especially miserable. I first stopped by the bank to deposit some work reimbursement checks, which put me near Central Ave., so then I had to head towards the SUNY-Albany campus to the pet store. That whole region is a bicycling Bermuda triangle, which is how I foolishly wound up following the Goog's instructions to ride in the dirty gutter on Western Ave. Ugh. The second miserable part was right after leaving the pet store, when it started to rain in earnest and I had to traverse through an intersection with freeway on/off-ramps. By the time I got to campus, I'd burned through the rear brake pads I put on just a week or two ago, and it looks like something wedged in one front brake pad caused it to scrape curly metal shavings out of one of my front wheel's rims. Ugh.
But I made it to campus, and it looks like all the insects survived, so that counts for something.
The various aesthetic improvements I've been gradually making to the animal-rearing situation is helping to make the animal-rearing tasks more pleasant, at least.
For example, it's now fun to watch the bettas eat for a couple of minutes when I go to feed them. I was going to put these two females into a colleague's tank, but they're so cute that I've been procrastinating on the changeover. They are a variety known as koi bettas.
I've decided to name this male Clifford. I really need to put him up for adoption, though.
My students named this guy Josh Allen, and I heard that shortly thereafter his namesake won some sort of MVP award for some sort of sportsball.
Gari, of course, is always Gari (updated spelling to reflect that she's female, per student request):
The feeding clips I got for feeding the horseshoe crabs seem like they're making the crab feeding easier, which is great. There's one feeding clip in the foreground of this photo, that also has a mesh support to contain the squid pieces in place where the crabs can get to them (ie not floating at the top of the tank). It's not clear yet whether the crabs can get the squid chunks out of this one, however.
Overhead view:
View of the entire flow-through saltwater tank:
And now I suppose it's time to get back to other work.
