Hi...
So my husband is off to Costco to get some much needed groceries (and pizza!
) and Puff and I are at home waiting for him to get back. I hope he'll drive careful because the roads are slushy. Breakup has finally started. Our daytime temperatures are up into the 40s and 50s and nighttime temps around freezing, which makes for slick ice in the morning. Our backyard is a mess of melting snow, puddles, and mud. :roll: I'm staying indoors for a little longer -- pretty soon it will be REALLY spring. :mrgreen: It comes late around here.
I've heard that peppermint and cayenne pepper help with mice, but I'm not sure about ants. I'm with you when it comes to using chemicals, especially when you have other animals around. I'm pretty sure that cats hate vinegar. It is weird that they're in a room where there's no food for them to find -- usually when you remove the food, the ants go elsewhere. You're right that some spiders might help.
Your guys sound like they are all at healthy weights, with or without poop included. Puff was up to 520 grams today, and that was after he finally pooped in his
bath -- it was a little overdue. I give him a little belly massage when he needs to poop and sometimes it works. That and the warm water.
Thanks for the good wishes for him. He continues to pig out on crickets. The pet store has not had roaches lately so we have to put up with the messy crickets :bleick: . Puff doesn't seem to mind and he thins out their population quickly enough so that they don't make a huge mess, especially if we're diligent about cleaning up after them every day. He's still eating squash and greens so he's getting a pretty balanced diet these days, even if it is a little too many bugs and not enough veggies, but that's normal for him. We let him eat as much as he wants, since he's tends to be underweight.
The general consensus among the vets is that he had a flareup of adenovirus, but he seems to be doing really well now, so we may have him for a few more years if all goes well. He is 9 years old now, or thereabouts, since we don't know his exact age for sure.
Sorry to hear that you lost your frog. Is 3 years considered a good life span for a frog? If so, I hope you can at least feel good about the way you took good care of him.
My husband used to bring Puff to bed with me for a bedtime cuddle, but one time I dozed off and almost rolled over on him. Luckily he wiggled and woke me up before I squished him, so we don't do that anymore. Now we only do bedtime cuddles when we're both still wide awake, and I sit in a chair. If he's already asleep at bedtime, we don't disturb him.
That's funny how your dragons react differently to the stuffie. Maybe Kane thinks it's a rival male but Broly thinks it's a female? Hard to know. :?
We inherited a rubber snake from my father-in-law. One summer when we were visiting him with Squirmles (our corn snake) we showed him the rubber snake and he was not impressed one way or the other. I supposed that since their best senses are touch and smell, vision not so much, that since it smelled and felt like a piece of rubber, he was not fooled by the fact that it looked like a snake. We have kept it as a remembrance of both Squirmles and my father-in-law, a reminder of happy times when they were both still alive. We call it "Jake the Snake."
We'd had Squirmles for 15 years and I was 60 when he died, so a fourth of my life -- the longest I'd ever had any critter. Anyway, the rubber snake is a very convincing replica of a real one, just like your stuffed bearded dragon, easily mistaken for a real snake and could scare people who are afraid of snakes. My father-in-law was into practical jokes, and used to put it in our bed and various such things. I'd play along and put it around my neck and tell him he let the snake get too cold and it looked like it was dead. He was a wildlife biologist and loved snakes, but he had this other side to him. He had dribble glasses and collapsing spoons and fake chocolate candies and all kinds of stuff like that.
Well, I guess I've rambled on long enough for one post. Have a nice weekend.