New Gecko

(Originally written on March 16th, 2009. Posted to COSA18 on September 16th, 2009.)

     After a doctor's appointment today, my dad and I went to Barnes & Noble so he could spend his gift card (he bought a book with poetry/CDs, I'll post a link to it later) that he got yesterday for his birthday.

     We went to Petco next door to look at geckos. Over the weekend I gathered correct information on the care of leopard geckos, credit to many websites I googled and especially GeckoForums.net, where members actually directly helped me out. I highly recommend signing up, it's a large community of friendly people, and it's not only for geckos, but for other reptiles.

     Anyway, today at Petco I picked up a log similar to this, a thermometer (not sure if this is the one I should have or not), and a red light bulb. Before just buying a gecko, I requested to be able to touch them all, like advised on various websites. I poked at all of them, and picked up a few. There were two that were larger than the others, but not as large as the ones I saw the other day in Tampa. I eventually picked out the one that came home with me (even though he is really small), who as you can see in the picture is quite bright and colorful, which definitely matches the personality he's showing. He loves to be held, and you have to nudge him a couple times to get him off of your hands! He's really cute, and I'm still debating on names (which I list at the end of this blog).

     It was suggested that I should get a gecko from a show or breeder rather than a pet store (especially chain I'd imagine), but I looked up breeders and couldn't find any close enough to me, or any shows in the near future (some just passed actually).

     Later on (after taking him home) we (+Kirk this trip) went to PetLand to buy crickets and another small hut. We looked for fake plants, but they didn't have much of a selection. They had leopard geckos there too, two for 50$. Oh well though, I'm really happy with the one I got.

     We went to Publix after for carrots and an apple to feed to the crickets to gutload them, hopefully it works and I'm doing it right. I might switch to the pre-condensed gutload cubes later on though depending on the opinions on GeckoForums.

     Here's a video of him that I made for a friend: