In which Brett and Jonathan adopt

First of all, sorry it's been so long since I last posted. Between finals and a very stressful spring break weekend, I just haven't had the energy necessary to keep up the blog. I think that might make me unreliable. Huh.

Anyway, Jonathan and I were looking at puppies online last week. (This is something we do on a semi-regular basis even though our apartment does not allow dogs. It's really a very sad scenario, but there isn't room for one here anyway. When we buy a house, we'll get a dog.) After finding several very suitable candidates for adoption, we got sad and decided to give it up. Somehow, I honestly couldn't tell you how, the conversation turned to Jonathan's older brother's former pet snake, a Burmese Python. I put my foot down on snakes that get to be up to 22 feet long. That was not acceptable to me. But I was open to the idea of something a little bit more apartment friendly.

We decided to go to Petsmart, where we looked at a few different varieties of snake, including ball pythons, milk snakes, and corn snakes, each of which only get to be 6 feet max. I played with a corn snake and milk snake both for a while, and I was pretty quickly convinced that getting one would be OK. Being the type of guy I am though, I wanted to check out some other places first, and Jonathan wasn't quite convinced because setting up the vivarium for the snake was a bit cost prohibitive. We went to a Petco, which was kind of sad and dirty and didn't have any corn snakes, only ball pythons. She suggested we check out a totally local place called Tropical Hut, which was only about a mile and a half from our place. We headed down there, where we met and talked to the owner and one of her good friends who were working on breeding some ball pythons. She was the most amazing source of information, and was able to give us a deal that brought our total cost to less than half of what the Petsmart was saying. And we got a more interesting, rarer snake in my opinion.

After a day to think on it and make sure we were ready for that sort of commitment, I talked to the land lady. She was cool with it, so last night when Jonathan was done with class we drove down to Tropical Hut and picked up Dorian. He seems pretty happy in his new home, seeing as how it's at least three times as big as his old one. It's pretty spartan for the moment, and this morning he's burrowed himself into the bedding to feel safer in this strange place, but we're going to get him some decoration and creature comforts in the coming week to help him feel more at home. Dorian is a Blood Corn snake, which refers to his skin color. Both his mother and father were Bloods, meaning that in their adult life their pattern faded and their main skin became a darker red, making for an all red snake. I'll keep you posted on his developments, but we're super excited to have Dorian living with us. It's a nice feeling, that we're responsible for a life together.