The Return/The Olympics/Lucilla

It's nice to be back here after a 5 month absence. This blog will no longer be on the Cassini mission and news on various satellites of Saturn, but will be about me. Basically, I am replacing "Ionian Journal", a second blog I had but never updated, with this one. I changed the name of this blog to reflect this change, though Guabonito is still a Titan related name. Guabonito is a broken ring of bright material in eastern Shangri-la on Titan.

So, it is good to be back. This weekend, I officially started my Olympics addiction. Every 2 years, I become glued to the TV to watch arcane sports like nordic combined (wow, jumping 100 meters on skis, then racing 9 miles on skis), water polo (like basketball in a pool), and short-track speed skating (roller derby on ice). What is it about the Olympics that compels people to watch sports that they wouldn't watch at another time but the Olympics. I'm sorry, but if there was a nordic combined competition on, I would watch it unless I had a gun pointed at me. Granted I still won't watch figure skating (prancing around on ice, no matter how many times you can spin around, is NOT a sport), but yet now I want to watch luge (but not two-man luge, that just seems wrong for some reason), snowboarding, downhill alpine skiing, etc. Maybe NBC Universal puts something in the water supply...

Lucilla, my 9-month old Bell albino leopard gecko, is finally eating again after taking a month off. She ate a few times over the last month, but usually it wasn't sustained, maybe eating one or two crickets here and there. I finally figured that it was partly my fault. See, I would put the dusted crickets in a food dish, sans there back legs and their front legs to keep them from escaping the disk. However, this often ilmobilized them more than I wanted, and by the time Lucilla was interested in hunting, the crickets barely moved. Geckos hunt using the movement of their prey to key on them before striking (think T-rex in Jurassic Park) so this lack of movement caused Lucilla to not be interested in them. So last night, I waited for Lucilla to go into hunt mode (her eyes become dilated, she stares out her hide, focusing on my movements), threw four unmolested (except for the dusting) crickets into her cage, and she went after them. She ended up bagging three of the four. Good for her. She certainly looked happy after getting some hunting in.

That's all I have for now.