Aw, Look at Da Liddle Baby

There comes a time in every pet owners life when they feel they must gush about their newest addition. For me, it is time. Yes, I already wrote a post/impassioned plea about not fearing my little one, but did I mention how pretty she is? No. It's time to correct my egregious omission.

The silliest part of it all is that I was more than a little disappointed when I first brought Vixen home. For weeks before the dinkiest reptile show known to man--or at least me--I researched everything I could about corn snakes. I knew the care would be similar to what I gave Henrietta, but I wanted to make sure I would do whatever I could to make my little baby happy and healthy. Included in this research were hours and hours spent poring over pictures of corn snakes. How much time could that really take, you may ask? A lot. There are hundreds and hundreds of different corn snake morphs/colorations. You are probably aware that most animals have a normal coloration and a rarer albino form. Well Corn Snakes can greatly vary between and outside of these two opposites. Herp keepers have played around with an almost infinite variation of breeding pairs in the hopes of 'creating' a pretty new color to brag about. Yellow, black, grey, white, pink, purple, orange, red, brown--any of these colors could be found on a Corn Snake. Anyway, I managed to narrow down my morph preferences to a couple colorations. I even had names for them depending on their gender and color--a female lavender, a male normal, a male grey. An idea/preference for everything EXCEPT an orange and reddish female.

I was entered the smallest convention area I've ever seen, and forlornly discovered that about only two tables had any corn snakes on them at all. If I had been looking for a Ball Python, boy, would I have been lucky. There were absolutely no lavenders, my top choice. Who wouldn't want a pretty purple snake?--well, of those people who don't have a heart attack at the sight of any snake. After less time than I would have liked searching, I half-heartedly settled on a little girl whose first course of action upon me picking her up was to immediately attempt to dart her little head straight into my shirt. A really courageous one she was. She was smaller than any snake I had ever held and I was nervous like a new mother, afraid I might drop her delicate little body straight to her untimely death. I held a few others after her, but for some reason I felt drawn to this little one. She wasn't what I was looking for at all.

Even as the brave friends who had accompanied me drove me home from the reptile show, I stared at my new unnamed pet--who was trying to escape through the tiny airholes in her little deli-cup prison--and felt an uneasy queasiness in my stomach. Maybe in my eagerness to take home a new pet that very day (the next available show was months away) I had made a grave mistake. After all, Corn Snakes can live up to 15-20 years. Would I be saddled with my 'wrong' choice for a good portion of my adult life?

My confidence in my choice was not helped when I put her in her cage for the first time and she promptly disappeared, not to be seen for another week. While she explored/cowered in her new home I looked at my notes of possible snake names, which I had compiled a few days prior. All of the names were comic book inspired, to keep in the same style of the kitten I had helped name Nemesis (finally breaking the cycle of jazz legend cat names in the Churchfamily). The name Vixen jumped out at me for my new Corn. (Vixen is a fiesty superheroine who can channel the powers of any animal she wishes, by the way).

For the first week or so I left Vixen alone, only opening her cage to change her water. Not once did I try to move around her aspen-shavings bedding, or lift up her (intentioned) hide, to catch a peak of my recent purchase. Everything I had read had told me I should not put undue stress on a baby Corn by disturbing her right away. It was painful. All I wanted to do was to spend time with Vixen so that we could bond and I could get over my buyers remorse by falling in love with her. She did not make it easy. I waited a whole five days before I finally tried to pick her up for the first time. Ha!

I opened the cage and lifted up her hide. No Corn there. I moved around every square inch of her bedding, gradually becoming more panicked, as I slowly realized she wasn't there. I had lost my new pet. Maybe it wouldn't matter she wasn't the color I wanted. Maybe someday I would hear a shrill scream from one of my unfortunate apartment neighbors who had discovered an unwelcome gift hanging out near some kitchen or livingroom heat source. That would make me really popular at the Aspen.  I rambled to Alex about ways to find escaped snakes, telling myself in vain not to panic--everything will be okay--don't worry Alex--I'll find her---I'll... Ahhhhh!!! That, my friends, was the sound of me shrieking as I poked something really squishy crammed in the hollow space that I didn't know existed in the Petsmart branch I had bought my then hypothetical Corn to climb on. I had discovered Vixen in her new favorite hiding place. Somehow this incident made me think I had named her correctly. Vixen was one malicious woman.

I eventually changed her branch to one without any hollow spaces and gave her a new hide, since the one I had originally bought her was clearly way to big for her to feel secure in. Like a cat who completely shuns the cat bed you buy for it and then curls up in a box, Vixen greatly preferred hiding under the lid of an Apple product box I had cut a few enter/exit holes into. And it made her so much more accessible. Lifting a box from a cage and grabbing the wriggly thing underneath is ten times easier than trying to pry a determined body from a tiny hiding space.

Okay, so the point of this post has gotten away from me a little bit. My original intention was to gush. What I've been leading you up to (completely intentionally of course) is how I've fallen in love with my baby, after much adversity. I was conditioned not to be happy with her color, and her hiding-in-terror-or-fleeing-at-the-sight-of-me behavior was not endearing to say the least, and yet I am now very happy that I bought her. Wha Happen'd?

The answer is two fold. One, after making her more accessible we have had numerous handling sessions. Quite a few have ended with her entire body in my shirt, or me hurriedly putting her back in her glass home when she has gotten too rowdy. But every so often, she will settle down on my shoulders, seeming to prefer being at the highest point she can find--she's my little tree climber--and we will watch TV together. During these calm moments I really feel like we're bonding. Two, I have come to really admire her colors. Yes, a purple snake would have been awfully purrty, but probably pretty boring compared to my Vixie. Over time, her colors have gotten more magnificent. With each new shed, some colors become more subtle and others begin to pop. Originally I had decided that if I did get an orangey Corn, I would want to see reds, oranges and yellows on it. It seemed at first that Vixter would only have red and orange. Luckily, the yellow that is on Vixen's neck has become more pronounced. She's my beautiful little sunrise. My citrus baby. My Vixen.

But don't just take my word for it. See for yourself.



Vixen about two months ago

Vixen a week ago.

In a few days Vixen will shed again. (That is part of the reason I made this post. The week before Vixen sheds she hides the whole time. Looking at pictures is the only way I can see her, which makes me unhappy.) I can't wait to see what subtle changes will come with her new skin. 



The yellow/ yellowish-orange on her neck/first half is getting more yellow. I am happy.

 

And I can't wait for her to be adult sized. Then, there will be no way for her to hide from me!



Access

It is 9:06am on a Wednesday and I am not in my bed. What unholy twist of fate made this terrible fact come to pass? I am…*dramatic pause*…employed.

You may ask, why I am writing a blog post when I am at work. Don’t I have other things I should be doing? Like working? Long story short, no. But because this is a blog post, you shall not get the short story.

To get the basics out of the way, I now work for a contracting company—let’s call it CT—and my contract is with a large organization of the Federal Government, which I shall call HQ. (I am erring on the side of caution, as I have recently been reminded of the dangers of not editing yourself on a public blog). I was officially hired on August 1^st, I started work on the 27^th, and today is my 12th day on the job. So, again, why am I writing a blog post at 9:34am on a Wednesday morning while at work?

The really important word/concept in this absurdity is ‘access’. Funnily enough, when you are working at a government office, you need access to things—information, email accounts, resources…a building. In order to get access in the Federal world, you must meet all the conditions of security.

Step one was getting finger printed for the first time. I went to HQ and after walking through an empty door frame of security, a HQ grunt led me down into a creepy, extremely sterile basement. As I sat down on a very firm couch, I thought about what being fingerprinted would be like. And now I must admit something embarrassing. In my mental simulation of finger-printing I put the tips of my fingers on an ink pad and smudged a piece of paper with my genetically individual mark. What decade did I think I was living in? After a short wait, a surly middle aged man gruffly barked at me to come in. He took each of my fingers firmly in his hand and, one at a time, pressed my finger onto a little scanner, moving it from left to right. Apparently, I didn’t know how to do it right because for every finger he grabbed he would harshly exclaim, “Make your fingertip flat! Relax your finger! Don’t pop it up. Flat!! RELAX!” Relaxing is not the word I would use.

A few weeks later, I had to take the next step in the security process. I completed two infuriatingly complicated, for no reason, training sessions on a website that is so temperamental and obsessive compulsive that I wanted to recommend a good psychiatrist to it. After making my computer fit all of the requirements it needed to play a little video that I ended up just reading the transcript for anyway, I spent three hours of my life proving that I am not, in fact, a total idiot. And that is all I should say about that.

And then on August 27^th ‘work began’. That week I spent the first three days at the CT office and the second two at HQ. (It looks like I will be splitting my time in a similar way for the foreseeable future.) CT is a very nice place to be. I get unlimited free bottled and canned water (which I’m told is a gift in DC where the water quality is similar to that of a pond located in a third world village) and a cozy little cubicle to call my own. But, best of all, I can come into the building without a security screening. At HQ I am not so lucky.

By the first week I had access to my CT email and…and…internet explorer? However, I had no access to anything HQ related, including, the right to walk through the front door as I please. In order to bypass a daily security screening, awkward nametag, and a HQ employee escort  who takes me up three floors in an elevator, I need a HQ badge. Without it, I’m about as self-sufficient as a baby panda. I have given them my finger prints, I have completed their training, and given references to send security background check letters to (which HQ has not sent out yet because...they don't feel like it?). But I can’t go into their building or look at any of things I need to do my job, which is kind of a problem since I am supposed to take over someone else’s job at HQ in less than two weeks.

Luckily, yesterday brought with it a breakthrough. I now have remote access to HQ’s internal servers. Meaning, I now have an HQ email address and a CT one! But still no access to anything else. And the real kicker? As it is now, I can’t access the HQ system at the HQ office, but I can at CT’s office. This makes about as much sense as a superhero that can hide his heroic identity with an insubstantial pair of glasses. The reason for my ‘access’ paradox lies in the HQ badge. HQ recently set in place a system where you have to insert your badge into the keyboard in order to log on. Man, I’m telling you, once I have a HQ badge (and access to the five databases/systems/websites I’ll need for my position) it’ll be puppies and rainbows from then on.

For now I am helplessly and unproductively stuck in the mire of bureaucracy and security requirements that will eventually (i.e. probably, I hope) lead to pure unadulterated (i.e. heavily managed and specific) access to everything (i.e. the things that HQ deems I absolutely require access to) I need to be the best (i.e. moderately productive and helpful) CT/HQ employee I can be.

Let the additional paperwork begin!

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Postscript:

Sorry, for some reason this post felt fragmented. Maybe I am just too tired—haven’t got used to the new sleep schedule yet. Connections and smooth transitions are easier to make when brain power is at your disposal. I apologize.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it is 10:45 am. I have to go draw a picture of Batman riding a baby elephant now.