Time Travel

So recently I went a little further into the future because I was no longer satisfied with only being ahead 4 hours. I have decided that now I will be 5 hours ahead of you guys!! Just joking, I can't actually time travel (sadly) it was just daylight savings in Brazil.

Here it is common to not go out for your night until about midnight and so when I went out on Saturday I technically didn't leave the house until 1AM! Some nights we don't get back until about 6 because of the late start and the fact that the bars seem like they never close, but we didn't get back until 9AM!!! Did not feel like it was THAT late, that's for sure! It was a good night out though; snooker (I'm getting better every time! I almost won once haha), some beers, walking beside the lake, and of course playing with super cute stray dogs (typical Karen thing to do). I think that this time change was harder to adjust to than the jet-lag was when we first arrived! Weird.

I went to work with my turtles again today and I only have a little bit of sad news this time; #53 passed away. He isn't one of the ones that I have described before in other posts but it was still sad to find him. I looked up his information from the first day of measurements and he did not have any lesions or wounds that we were concerned with. However, under my "notes" column I had written "foaming at the mouth". A couple other turtles are like this as well but they are usually the more agressive ones and I just took it as being a sign of defense. Turtles don't get rabies... do they? I am going to do some reading and try to see if I can find papers or articles that mention this as a symptom to some diseases or problems (maybe respiratory?). I will keep you posted with what I find out - in the mean time, lets all hope that I don't get myself into another rabies situation!

Now for the good news!! #55 (the new guy I found last time) is alive and doing well! I was a little worried that he would just sit in the water and his skin would get worse. Luckily I was wrong and he's just as rambunctious as ever :D And even MORE good news! #45 (if you recall he was the small and blind turtle that I loved from the start) is getting better! He is not as lethargic as he used to be and his eyes are getting tons better. His left eye is completely opened (with a little swelling) and his right eye is just behind it! Just for fun, an update on #33 because I like him a lot too (the one that has no front feet). He's happy as a little turtle should be, just hanging out and swimming around in his own super cute way; he kind of looks like he has put pool floaties on his back feet because they are always higher than his front with all his toes spread really wide apart.

I changed their water today and pulled out a bunch of the leaves that were in the pool. Of course I didn't think to ask if they had been fed yet before cleaning them and as I was sitting on the edge just watching all my little guys hang out - lunch arrived. So my crystal clear, PRISTINE, water was almost immediately turned to scuzzy fish water. Had to happen eventually anyways I suppose. At least this way they had a good view of where their food was :P I still feel bad for the little turtles when it comes to feeding time. They just don't have the size to compete agains all the big ones to get a good chunk of fish. Most of the small ones are left eating the small floating pieces left over. To give you an idea of just how small these bits are I thought of a pretty good analogy; remember in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" when the Grinch was going to all the Whos' houses, leaving crumbs much too small for all the Whos' mouses? That's the kind of small that I'm talking about. But #50 looked like he was having a blast dodging the other turtles and snatching them up! He is now anoher one of my favorites - he has an extra long and pointy tail which I like to think helps him bomb around the pool and makes him relatively easy to spot among the other 53 turtles.

After work I came home and showered and then Vanessa and I went downtown to take care of a few errands. I can't remember if I wrote it here or not but I had lost one of the balls to my nose ring the other day which resulted in me having to walk around ALL WEEKEND with it tucked up inside (since the store that I needed was closed until Monday). That was one of the things we did and now I'm all back to "normal"! It feels so much better outside of my nose, and I also feel a lot less naked. We went to take my camera in for an estimate of how much it would be to fix it - they said it's free to get the estimate but only if I actually fix it, otherwise it's 20R to have them tell me what they would do without actually doing it. The guy was pretty nice though and told me the most likely problem with my camera and that it usually costs 90R to fix it. Now I don't know what to do - spend the money to have them look at it with the possibility of it being more expensive, or use Vanessa's old digital and wait until I get home to fix my camera (or possibly buy a new one).

Now I'm going to update the data for my turtles on my computer, do some research, and write out a proposed meal plan for my adorable bale of turtles :D

P.S. A bale is what you call a group of turtles
P.P.S. No I did not know that before and yes I looked it up specifically to write here in my blog
P.P.P.S. I love/miss you.... yes, YOU!