A few new ones

First, this is a girl. Second, I hope they serve donuts in jail.


Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!


This is an amazing flat top head.


Did you ever see the movie Beetlejuice?


And finally, this guy thinks he is on American Idol.

Good book

How do you rate a book? Is it by the way it makes you feel? By the amount of new information you learn? Or some other emotion? The kinds of books I read are either biographies about people I find interesting, about travel, or, just plain funny. I love Bill Bryson who combines travel and humor. I've read most of his books and recommend them to people who like smart, funny writing. I also like Dave Barry, who was a writer for the Miami Hearld, I'm not sure if he still is, but he also writes books that I find hilarious. I use to find out about a lot of the books I've read from a syndicated radio show, Mancow. That show is no longer on in the immediate Des Moines area, so I've had to look at ather sources for my reading material. I found an article the other day in the DSM Register about a guy from Ankeny, Iowa, just north of me, who wrote a book. The story sounded good. He left a good job with a company in Denver to become a truck driver so he could write a book about all of his adventures. I pulled up his website and found that his humor might just be right up my alley. I'm a few chapters in and I have to say that, so far, I was 100% right. How do I judge a book? If it makes me LOL (Laugh Out Loud), its a good book. It made me cry last night. Marcy even made me read it out loud, she said because she wanted to see what was so funny, but my guess it was to see how far off the deep end I have gone. She thought it was funny, but since there was a lot of the "F" word, not as big a fan. I hope the rest of it is just as funny, because it is one of those books that I just don't want to put down.

Lizard update

Due to popular demand, with half my reading audience requesting it, I decided to post a lizard update. OK, it was one request, which technically is a third of my readership, soooooo.

I must say that I was a little skeptical about a lizard. What can you do with a lizard? Is it like fish, you just watch them? Turns out, you can do very little with a lizard and yes, they are like fish, although watching them eat is far more interesting. He doesn't move much, so sitting in front of his tank for an extended period of time just isn't a good use of your time. It is pretty cool to see him in different parts of the tank and changing colors to blend in. We have a smaller tank that we now keep his dinner in, crickets. We buy crickets at the local pet store. I was keeping them in the bag I bought them in, but was realizing that several were dying before I could feed them to him. I had the idea to put them in this other tank and feed them so we could get our monies worth. Turns out, we pay almost $5 for 36 crickets and he is eating about 5 crickets a day. I certainly didn't want to get 36 crickets and only be able to feed him 30 or so. I read on the internet that you can feed the crickets pretty much anything, it's called gut loading, then that food is transferred to the lizards. Since we always have carrots, apples and strawberries in the house, that is what I have been feeding them. It seems to be working. Since I started this new system, we haven't lost any of the crickets to an early death. We are hoping to catch our own crickets in the yard soon, so we can cut down on our purchasing of crickets, but I need to read on the internet to be sure that "wild" crickets are safe for a lizard. I would think so, but you never know. He seems to be doing well. He has been taken out of his tank twice and has escaped from the kids hands both times. Thankfully, Makiah is very good at catching him, so we don't have any dead lizards in the vents, yet. Today we are going to work on cleaning out the cage, hopefully we don't loose him.