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Old 08-09-2017, 11:41 AM   #53
Rich Z
Aarrggh... The sentence "And in the meantime, we have had time for family and friends, and they all got used to that." should have been

"And in the meantime, we had NO time for family and friends, and they all got used to that."

I used to use colored dots for everything as status indicators during breeding season. For the eggs, a red dot on the egg incubating container meant that they had begun to hatch. That "8,000" baby year, I had those plastic shoe boxes EVERYWHERE. In whatever rack space there was, perched on top of racks, and stacked on the floor. That "running and screaming into the woods day" was when I had walked into the building and saw literally hundreds of incubating boxes with red dots on them, and I remember thinking, "There is just no way in Hell I am going to be able to keep up with this. Babies are going to die because I will not be able to get them set up and offered food quick enough." And that likely happened. It seemed that if you don't offer a baby snake food soon enough, then they will NEVER eat and just die.

I still have nightmares where I will walk into the reptile building and discover a door to a room I had forgotten about. And when I walk into that room, it is filled with cages of dead snakes that I had simply forgotten about and they all died from neglect. That gives me cold sweats just thinking about the dream.

Heck, I'm sitting here typing this thinking that the Daytona Beach Expo is just a couple of weeks away. This time of year was when it was the absolute worst. So many babies hatching out needing to be set up, yet we had to start getting ready for Expo. While at the show, I always had the thought in the back of my mind that we had SO much work waiting for us back at home. And we were losing valuable ground just being away for the weekend.

I still can't believe we escaped before the stress killed us.