Sex and the Dragon

In case you were wondering: THIS is what 1,000 giant mealworms looks like.

I received two boxes by Fed Ex at the museum last week: my orders of 500 live crickets and 1,000 live mealworms from Flukers Farms. Even with the $20 FedEx shipping fee, it's less than half the cost of buying crickets for Mambo from PetCo. My co-workers got a kick out of letting me know that my crickets were waiting for me on the dock. It's a little surprising that anything animal-related even raises an eyebrow around here. I guess most of the time the stuff coming into our museum is dead, but nobody bats an eye if one of the curators walks through the front door holding a wriggling pillowcase or a cart full of mouse skeletons... so why are crickets such a riot?

I took them home and dumped the crickets (500 IS a LOT of them) into their Rubbermaid tub, and shook the mealworms into a Tupperware container with a cup of cornmeal and stuck it in the fridge. I'll have chow for Mambo for a couple of weeks at least.

Last week, driven by the boredom of the ice storm and the mutual illnesses of both myself and Grayson, I went online and looked up "how to tell the gender of your bearded dragon."

It was not, I have to say, all that helpful. There are theoretically two bumps under the tail of the male bearded dragon indicating where his two (two!) penises are located inside his body. The female has no humps or just a single central one. Mambo might have humps. Or not. Grayson and I spent some minutes peering at the poor creature's backside, with nothing definitive to show for it, except for a slightly irritable bearded dragon.

Perhaps he/she is still too young to tell. Mambo is only about 4 or 5 months old. So we'll check again in a couple of months. I'll keep you posted.

As I mentioned, I've been under the weather. Just your garden-variety cold, for the most part. But I was obliged to work through part of it, so I think that's delayed my recovery. I had to host the film crew from Extreme Makeover Home Edition last week, just after coming down with the cold. That was not quite your typical out-of-town film crew. They used four or five cameras all at once and were done in record time. They were a little intense and off-putting at first, but either they warmed to us or we warmed to them and I felt good about it by the time they left.

ANYWAY... I'm still trying to shake the cough and stuffy nose. And then this weekend I had a strange return of the all-over joint achiness that sent me to the doctor for bloodwork back in July. That's when I got the call that I might have Lupus and should see a rheumatologist. Well at last, on the 25th of this month, I will actually visit said rheumatologist. But until now I haven't had a return of the pain. I was sore on Saturday night and in real pain on Sunday morning. I lay on the sofa on a heating pad, feeling sorry for myself for a couple of hours until the ibuprofen kicked in.

It's a strange feeling. Starts out as a general stiffness and achiness, and I don't know if the level of pain actually gets worse or if it is just so pervasive that it wears on your psyche. But it becomes debilitating. I'm glad to have the doc's appointment coming up so there's a chance he can tell me what the hell is going on.

Today I'm back to my usual bad back and creaky hips: run-of-the-mill, B-flat everyday pain that I'm accustomed to. Strange that should seem like such a good thing. It's like my friend Jill said once: "Being 43 feels just like 33, only everything hurts."