Friday, June 20, 2008

Back on track - well sort of...

I decided to stop lying around feeling sorry for myself, and I went to the zoo this morning (having slept for a good 14 hours last night). It was hard, they've changed my frogs into bigger tanks, which is theoretically nicer for them, although they can dehydrate quite easily if they aren't sprayed enough, and now I can't clean tanks without a spotter (someone to watch for escaping amphibians while I clean). The openinng is just far too big for me to control what's going on. I was mildly annoyed by the whole situation - firstly I was supposed to go in on Wednesday and today to help with treatments, but they seem to have rescheduled without telling me. That's a relief as I wasn't able to do very much at all on Wednesday, so I'm quite glad I didn't let them down.

What annoyed me even more than being out of the loop, is that I was there to move frogs into tanks on Sunday and I decided (and was confirmed by the volunteers there - who are the people who actually do all the husbandry) that the big tanks, despite all the niceness of having more space were completely impractical in terms of husbandry and keeping humidity relatively constant. then on the first day that I wasn't tehre the higher-ups who have very little contact with the animals and the day-to-day handling of them made a decision without asking any of us or even listening to the little volunteers (who argued as hard as they could). They also put a bunch of frogs from different tanks together, which is bad as far as I'm concerned as a bunch of them are developing lesions and we're pretty sure they're contagious.

It's not my place to make decisions, but at the same time, it really annoys me that nobody even asked the people who are involved what their opinions were. I just hope that the frogs don't have to suffer, so I hope that I am wrong.

On a happier note, some of the big geckos laid eggs a while ago, and I hadn't known that one of the staff had put them in vermiculite and one of them hatched! It's the cutest baby gecko ever! It's so so so adorable! The whole time we were cleaning tanks this morning we'd occasionally rush over to the baby gecko tanks and start going "awwww!" it's really cute! And the other eggs are also about to hatch, we were holding them up to the lights to see the developing geckos and it's so cool!

And I'm going ice-skating again on Tuesday! I went on Monday with Luke and Duncan and Candice and it was awesomely fun, so on Tuesday Lara and I and whoever else we can scrounge up are going to go for half-price skating night! I'm glad because every time I skate I think to myself that I should go more often, and then I don't go for years and years... I can only go forwards and a little bit backwards now, hardly any of the cool stuff I used to do. But it's still fun, and I lvoe ti and I'm going to go more often. Really!

And I've spent most of the day at university and actually got some work done! I'm about to smash my computer for being uncooperative, but I'm making progress! Now I'm going to go home and sleep until tomorrow!

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