Hah! I can still plainly remember the year I produced 8,000+ babies. I used to set up the incubating eggs in plastic shoe boxes and stash them where ever I could. I had boxes every conceivable place in that reptile building. I would use colored dots for status markers (a trick I learned from Bill & Kathy Love) and of course, the red dot was for when the babies began to pip in that particular clutch.
Well I remember one day standing there looking upon a mind numbing of red-dotted boxes that needed to have the babies set up to offer their first meals. You can't wait too long to do that, otherwise it seemed that they would quickly lose the will to feed. So I am standing there thinking about all of the babies that had already been set up and needed to be fed every night, and then how many more yet to go. I swear, I never knew before that day what someone meant when they mentioned the term "panic attack". I don't remember going into the back room, but I do remember leaning on the freezer back there holding my head in my hands in a cold sweat and breathing extremely rapidly with shallow breathes. I took absolutely every bit of will power I to keep from opening that back door and do running off into the woods just screaming. It was one hell of a scary feeling. And probably the very first chink in my armor letting me know that I couldn't keep on doing this for very much longer.
I still have nightmares every now and again, of finding a room that I had forgotten I had in the building, and then when I opened the door I had rows and rows of cages filled with dead and desiccated snakes that I had just forgotten about for who knows how long. That is another one that gets me breaking into cold sweats just thinking about. Honestly, I did have something like that in small scale happen to me. It was a female Honduran milk that during the beginning of hibernation season for some reason I moved her cage into a corner on the floor. Something I never did. So with the lights out for a few months, with only going in every few weeks to clean out the water bowels and put in fresh water for all of them, this one I moved not only escaped my notice, but that of everyone else working for us at the time. So come Spring time, she had long ago had her water bowl dried up, and she just died from dehydration. You would think that with the thousands of snakes I worked with, that deaths wouldn't hit me so hard. But hell, they sure did. Especially ones that I was the cause of.
Ah well, looks like I am starting a book here......
Another reason why I am not interested in writing a book: Proof reading is a real pain in the butt lately! I just got done writing something, so why the heck do I want to waste my time reading that all over again?
So often times, I don't. And just as often regret it.
