Q and R are for:

Yes, yes, I am a huge slacker.  Well, not so much a slacker as incredibly busy and habitually exhausted! Anyway! Here are my next two. Mom is up to R, so I better catch the hell up! It's my blog mom, I can say hell if I want.

Q is for quilts! When I worked at JoAnn fabrics, I already had one potentially expensive crafting habit (knitting, which was the topic for K). Knitting doesn't have to be expensive, but it is when you do it like I do. I am now a yarn snob, no $2 skeins of Red Heart acrylic shit for me! But back to the letter at hand, quilting! Employees get free class admission, so I took the quilting class. I loved it! As with knitting, quilting allows me to be creative within the structured confines of a pattern. It speaks to both my left and right brain! I can pick out cool fabrics that look great together, while enjoying the technical aspects of getting everything perfect! Here is a pic of a quilt I happened to have handy. I have more, and better, but I still like this one. The mushrooms are trippy!

See the straight stitching lines? Those are a bitch and a half to get right! So for some present giving occasion or another, Mom decided to enable my habit and bought me a free form embroidery foot for my machine, and now I quilt in squiggles!

R is for rats. I'm just gonna let the adorableness of the following pictures speak for themselves.

Go check out mom's idea for what R means to her right over here!

O and P are for:

So I've been crazy busy lately. I have pics for most of my missed letters, but I haven't posted them yet. Well, I am going to remedy that starting today! On this post, I have my O and P contributions.

O is for opossum. To be exact, this is a short tailed opossum. We have two right now, a boy and a girl. This is the girl in a little piece of PVC tubing.

These little kids are my favorite new addition to our department. They have the coolest prehensile tails. The male likes to take the shredded paper we put in there and push pieces of it down into his tail and carry it all around curled up into his tail till he gets to his hut to make a nest. Cutest freaking thing ever!

P is for pigs! Warty pigs, but still pigs!

Don't really have a story for them, they're just cute!

And as always, check out what mom posted in a much more timely fashion than I did!

N is for:

Nails! I treated myself to two new colors of nail polish, a green and a blue, so I had to use both of them on my nails! I didn't want to favor either on my hands, so I used a pink for the thumbs. Sometimes I like to get in touch with my roots (read:childhood).

Check out what mom found for N!

L is for:

Lazy! Look at this dog, just sitting in his bed in the shopping cart, doing nothing, He is so very lazy! This is our PetCo store "mascot", Shark. He's the dog trainer's dog.

I am also exhibiting lazyness by not writing more.

heck out mom's L over here!

K is For:

First off: look at me, posting on time and shit! WOOHOO! Secondly: knitting. That's what K is for today. I recently finished knitting a lovely shawl, and now I just have to block it out. That is one of my least favorite parts, so it will likely take a while before blocking gets done. In the mean time, I stretched it out as much as I could on my bed and took pics! (pics or it didn't happen!)

Dunno if mom has her K up yet.

J is for:

June. Look mom! I'm posting this on the day I'm supposed to! In two days it will be June, and a few days after that will mark my 2 year anniversary of being in Arizona. :( So I have a reptile calendar that I got from PetCo after the new year on clearance for like $3 and I like it. Here is June's pic.

Go see what mom came up with for J. Hell, I haven't even seen it yet!

H is for

Homemade. As in homemade jam! I was going to take a pi of my hermit crabs, but then I got home yesterday and made jam and I wanted to show it off. It's delicious strawberry/raspberry/mango. Yummy!

Go check out what my mom found that starts with H!

G is for:

Great Horned Owl. This post is coming in a day late because I went to sleep after work yesterday because I felt like shit. Anyway, we have two GHOs at the zoo. We have Annie, a 20 year old female, and Charlie, the 2 year old whipper snapper that I'm currently working with. Annie has been with us for nearly all of her 20 years, so she knows the drill in regards to handling, presentation, etc. Charlie we have had since the fall after he was hatched (so at little under a year old) and no one had time to work with him until I started working with him this last winter. So I'm training him to allow collection, and sitting nicely on the glove. He's doing pretty good. He has come a long way from when we first started, that's for sure! Both of these birds are at the zoo because they are non-releasable. Both have cataracts that severely impact their ability to hunt, and you may notice that Charlie's right eye is significantly smaller than his left.

The first two are Charlie sitting on my glove, giving me The Eye. The second two are Annie sitting on her perch with a delicious mouse.

Check out my mom's blog for her G contribution.

F is for:

Farmers market! One of the few great things about Phoenix is the abundance of farmers markets. They are all smaller than the huge one in Minneapolis that I grew up with, but I like it like that. At the larger one in downtown Phoenix, all merchants have to certify that they grew/made all of the products that are being sold, so you know that it's really local and someone didn't just go to the store and are passing it off as their own.  I'm gonna let the pics speak for themselves. All pics are SOOC.

Check out mom's contribution to bettering the letter F.

E is for:

Elephant. So this pic might be cheating a little, since I didn't technically take it, but I am in it! I figured mom might like a pic with me in it. It was taken by a coworker with the express purpose of this ABC challenge though, so I'm gonna go with it.

Go check out mom's E entry.

D is for:

Dinner. I had all sorts of plans for D. I was gonna get pics of the Degus at the zoo, but that didn't happen. Then I was going to take a pic of the djungarian hamsters at PetCo, but that didn't happen. So I took a pic of my dinner. I made roast the other day, and it finished shortly before I went to bed so I didn't eat any of it hot that night. I saved the drippings to make gravy, intending to eat it for dinner the following night, but that didn't happen. Instead, I ended up eating the whole thing in a series of sandwiches. They were delicious!

Check out my mom's making-me-homesick addition to the letter D.

C is for

Coati! This is Zippy, our White Nosed Coati. He is adorable and I am really excited to get to work with him finally!

 

Go check out my mom's page for her C contribution!

B is for:

Bed. I wish I could spend some more time here, but I work a lot, and read too much instead of sleeping.  I could have taken a great pic for B if I had remembered about this today. I keep forgetting!

 

Go see mom's B post!

Trying something new (A)

First off, I don't like this new posting set up. There aren't enough contrasting colors on this page, everything just blends together! Argh!

Anyway, at the behest of my mom, I'm starting this new thing. We're essentially doing a photo alphabet, but not in the way you think. Instead of taking a picture of a letter, we're shooting things that start with that letter. We will be posting these photographs every Sunday and Wednesday. Today is the first day, so today's letter is obviously A. (If you were wondering why there was an (A) in the subject line, that's why). So, without further ado, I give you my submission for A:

Amelanistic and Anerythristic

This is my Snow morph corn snake, Winston. To get a Snow snake, you breed and Amelanistic snake with an Anerythristic one. Those are just really fancy words meaning respectively: no melanin (that brown/black pigmentation) and no red pigment. He's a very pretty snake!

Click to see my mom's contribution to the letter A.