Note: Since I have a lot on my plate to do the next week or so, I won't be able to post for a while. In the meantime, I have offered to a couple people to send guest posts. One is below from a guy who works with reptiles. Enjoy peeps! (Oh yeah, I don't know how to make the background color stay blue when I copy text from an email because there's no "paste text only" option so if anyone can enlighten me on that I would appreciate it)
I'm a Reptile Guy. At least, that's what people call me. I travel with a car load of reptiles to schools, events, parties, etc. and "edutain" (that's educate and entertain, in case you were wondering) people with my scaly friends. I have come away with some very interesting stories and I'd like to share a few with you. As with any critter, these guys don't like being crammed in their boxes or cages all day, so they tend to scratch on them all day. Most are small, but some can be quite large, and make a lot of noise. So when I hear them bumping around in the back of my SUV, I pay very little attention.
Well one day, while driving north on I-285, I heard the usual bumping and scratching I always do. So as usual I ignored it and kept driving. After a while, I felt something rub against the bottom of my left arm, I looked down and all I saw was my seat belt. "OK, no big deal," I thought, so I shook it out of my head and kept driving. Then I felt something against my leg. I was about to look down when I heard a glass *clink*. "Must be that empty Frappuccino bottle rolling around," I rationalized.
As traffic began to speed up, I went to press down on the accelerator but was met with resistance. I thought, "Could it be the bottle wedged underneath?" As I looked down, my eyes locked with another set of eyes staring up at me from between my legs, about 6 inches from my, um, well...my crotch. It was Spot, a nearly 5 foot long monitor lizard, and might I add, a MEAT-EATER! Well after screaming quite loudly and swerving across at least 3 lanes of traffic, I finally calmed down and realized what happened. He must have forced the lid off his cage and crawled out. Since I was running late due to traffic, I decided to let him be. As long as I knew he was out, all would be fine. At least until he decided to crawl into my lap and play lap dog. Which was also fine, or so I thought. He decided to prop himself up and look out my side window. I thought nothing of it until I saw the car next to me swerve across 3 lanes of traffic. The driver, a middle aged soccer mom, was obviously screaming, while her young son had her iPhone and was taking pictures. OF ME! I still to this day hope to find those pics on Facebook! I can only imagine the captions..."The day that lizards learned to drive and mommy nearly killed us!"
Not all of my stories involve my critters getting loose in my car. Another time, a few months later, I was in a nice families house performing for a large group at a birthday party. I was showing off Sierra, an Arizona Mountain King Snake. She is normally very docile, but on this day it was quite cold, so she was anxious to find a warm place. And then she found my shirt sleeve. Before I could react, she had completely gone up my sleeve, crawled down the inside of my shirt and wrapped around my mid section. This brought about uproars of laughter from the kids and parents. I tried to get her out, but it became apparent that the only way to get her out was to unbutton my shirt. Well as I began to do so, a mother who was running late for the party arrived and walked in on everybody cheering, me unbuttoning my shirt, and pulling a snake from out of it. She too began cheering, exclaimed "This is just like my bachelorette party!", and began pulling money from her purse. I didn't know whether to die of laughter or embarrassment...but she did give me a nice tip!
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