Happy Dead Mouse Buying Day

Doesn't have the same ring to it as Happy Fish Buying Day, somehow. And no, the pointless photo is not of a dead mouse. There are plenty of dead mice in the freezer now and I could have taken their photos but chose not to.

You're welcome for that.

If anyone's curious as to the reason for the dead mice... they're for the snakes. Mice for the snakes, crickets for the salamander, and Quiznos for me.

I, er, stopped at Quiznos first. Didn't want the dead mice and (live) crickets to be slow roasted by the time I got back to the car, you see.

I can honestly say I never pictured myself going to a pet store and casually buying dead mice and crickets. I was a bit of a jumpy child (for "bit jumpy" read "I was massively neurotic"), and while we had plenty of pets we never had anything that couldn't get its nutrition out of a bag of processed food. Well, unless you count the monkeys.

And no, I'm not kidding about the monkeys.

I'm not sure what happened to turn me from someone who couldn't bear to have a butterfly land on her to someone who doesn't mind dangling a warmed-up mouse in front of a hungry snake (well, ok, so I minded dangling the mouse today, but only because it's the first time I've fed this particular snake and I wasn't sure how it would react). Four years of dissection labs in university probably didn't hurt, but that only gets a person used to dead things and the smell of Formalin. Maybe it's the part where I spend a fair amount of my professional life trying to convince children that creepy crawlies aren't gross or evil or something to be frightened of.

Say it enough and you start to convince yourself?

Maybe I just grew out of it. Or grew too lazy. It takes a lot of energy to be that afraid of everything around you, you know.

Anyway, the snakes are fed, the salamander is fed, the toad is fed, the crickets are fed (some of them to the salamander...), and so am I.

Back to work for all of us, I guess.