New year, New pets

So to celebrate getting a new full-time job, and having excess Christmas money hanging around I went to a reptile expo. I was also celebrating entering the final weeks of my retail job and having weekends back. I had a few interests, but with this being winter it was slim pickings for captive bred juvie snakes, they're much more common in late spring to mid-summer depending on species. I did pick up the two above Kenyan sand boas, hopefully females, one is a lighter yellow and the other is the traditional pinkish orange. I did have a few chances at adult snakes, but they were all too squirmy for me. I already have a boa and he is the most laid back of the snakes. The ones up for sale were all freaked out and thrashing, and having tried that exactly once I won't buy a very thrashy non juvenile snake. (I bought a sinaloan milk snake who thrashed so badly I thought he would injure himself, and after a few months I rehomed him because I couldn't get him to calm down at all.) Once a few years old a snake should be much more handle able if it's a species known for it. The two I picked were both much calmer, and after having them for a week both have also eaten. I also tried for females because they get bigger then the males, and I already have a male (judging by how he stopped growing at about 15 inches a few years ago). While I have no plans to bred them you never know. The real goal is a little silly. I have three large snakes, they all eat the same food, so the food can be bought in large quantities but eaten fast enough it doesn't get freezer burn. The sand boa eats much smaller food, that tends to get freezer burn since I have to buy it in even larger quantities, and only have one snake that eats it (the frog gets one about once a month, and the bigger snakes sometimes get one, but one snake takes a long time to go through a bag of a hundred fuzzies.) So I either wanted a baby corn who would eat fuzzies at a very good clip for a while, or something else that stayed smaller. The new boas are eating pinks, but will move up to fuzzies eventually, then I'll stop having the freezer burn problem.

I also took a chance on some fire belly toad tadpoles. I had an empty cycled fish tank, so they went in there. As of three weeks in, all but one have disappeared, but the one I have left is huge. Maybe I'll get an adult out of it eventually.

I have plans to rework the reptile room in the near future, probably moving the three larger snakes out into a cage stack in my bedroom and reorganize the smaller bedroom. I have to decide if the crested geckos will stay in their extremely inconvenient tanks, get moved to bins, or if I try to build them something custom. In the last few months i did pick up two exo-terra terrariums and love the front opening doors. They were short ones so the leopard gecko and the sand boa each got a new easy to access home. Two of the big snakes are still in tanks, and the corn has really outgrown it, while the ball could get away with the tank size I can't deal with how much of a pain it is to open or clean the tanks. Once it warms up I'm building shelving racks to deal with the cages, and to hopefully set up two fish tanks in my living room, once the snake gets out of one of the tanks. The fish I've hung onto for years have gotten new accommodations and live in a new tank in the kitchen. I'm also considering garter snakes Red-Sided - Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis can be convinced to eat rodents, or some other interesting looking different species in the future as well, depends on how my house rearranging goes.